Kāwhia Primary School

Leanne Apiti knows the Kāwhia community like the back of her hand.

As Principal of the small seaside town’s primary school since 2009, she and her staff have taught generations of local children and formed strong relationships with their families.

Kāwhia Primary School is a precious resource for this community on the Waikato’s west coast. It is a place for learning, and for passing on local knowledge, histories, traditions, and language.

Ensuring her school is safe and secure is one of the many improvements led by Whaea Apiti, as she is known by her pupils.

The original school block was built in 1922 and is now used as a classroom. Today, the school has an office block, two classrooms, a Māori medium class, and an Early Childhood Center filling the grounds, alongside a generous field complete with sunflowers and an impressive potato patch.

In 2020, Leanne jumped at the opportunity to upgrade the school’s security system when some Ministry of Education funding became available. Frustrations with the legacy alarm system came to a head after repeated alarm faults, service fees, and false guard callouts racked up huge bills for the school.

“We were having real problems with our security system, getting charged a lot. If there was a power cut, we had to replace the battery and pay for someone to come and fix it,” says Leanne. “We knew the system was getting old and we didn’t want to upgrade it because it was going to create more of a headache.”

If a community group wanted to use the school grounds Leanne had to come down to the school herself and unlock it for them, or hand over the keys.

An email from Gallagher about its new cloud-based security system arrived at the perfect time. “I didn’t have to go far to find a solution. Gallagher is local and understands our community,” says Leanne.

The app-based system means that Leanne can now control Kāwhia School’s security from anywhere, at any time. Using her smartphone, she can arm and disarm the security system, manage alarms, and add or remove users.

“The teachers love it. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for people to use the school. I liked the option that you can choose to add people and grant them access to the security system and then you can take them off whenever you want to.”