Schools around the country are preparing to welcome students back under alert level three but only a fraction of the roll will be attending.
Christchurch's Linwood Avenue School principal Blair Dravitsky has created space for the new-look school bubbles under alert level 3 but he's revealed only eight percent of his 450 students will attend next week.
"I made 320 phone calls to the families here over the last couple of days to find out whether they are coming back or not - we've got 28 children coming," he told Newshub.
And that's above the national average, according to the New Zealand Principals' Federation. President Perry Rush said of 350 schools surveyed, about six percent of students would attend when New Zealand drops to alert level 3.
The Ministry of Education doesn't have the actual numbers of those attending next week.
"From what I've heard the numbers that are registering to return are very small," Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told reporters on Thursday.
At the weekend, Auckland's Mangere College was short of hundreds of devices for its pupils to school from home. Two-hundred laptops have been sent out to its senior students but for year nine and 10 pupils, they'll have to go to school and pick up paper resources for homeschooling.
