Ministry of Education approves total $1.4 million to remove asbestos-contaminated sand

The Education Ministry says it will help 65 schools cover the bill for last year's clean up of asbestos-contaminated sand.

The ministry said it approved one-off grants totalling $1.4 million for removal, decontamination and make-good costs.

It said 127 schools applied for $1.66m between them but about half were turned down, mostly because they wanted recompense for asbestos testing, which the grant did not fund.

The payments followed the discovery of asbestos in some varieties of coloured sand last year.

Dozens of schools and early childhood centres were forced to shut at the time.

The Ministry of Education said in December of last year that it was setting up the scheme to provide support to schools having to spend thousands of dollars replacing contaminated carpet, curtains and other items.

At the time it said only schools "experiencing financial difficulty" would receive reimbursement for asbestos-testing costs.

Early learning services were not being included in the support scheme, the ministry previously said, as they were privately owned entities co-funded with government subsidies and parents fees.

Whānau Manaaki chief executive Amanda Coulston said last year the not-for-profit had spent $40,000 on testing for 13 of its kindergartens at the time and estimated the final cost to be between $300,000 and $350,000.

Principal of May Road School in Auckland's Mt Roskill, Lynda Stuart, was one of the schools that had been impacted and told Morning Report it was "pretty traumatic".

She said there were six specific areas in the school that were impacted, but it had affected the whole building as no one could go in.

Carpets had to be removed, along with acoustic roof tiles and painting had to be done.

On 1 February, she said she was notified the school would get just over $26,000 to cover removal and decontamination costs.

"Then in an email I was told it would depend on how much the overall costing was coming through from other schools whether or not there would be anything for remediation and then about three weeks later I got an email to say there was a further $37,773 plus GST arriving to support it."

That remediation would include wall linings, painting and carpets, Stuart said, but not the costs of things like extra wages.

"We have a number of children for whom change is really challenging so I had to up the teacher aide wages, keep people on for whole says rather than part days... we'd be at least 20 grand short. There's wages and then other costs that have been incurred."

She said she still did not have a list of everything that was removed from the school.

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