The Montessori classroom based at Grovetown School will close at the end of this school term because it has too few students to attract enough funding.
Marlborough Montessori Education Trust chairwoman Tracy Bedford said the class had just four pupils and needed about 15 students to justify the $60,000 in teachers' salaries for another year.
The two specially trained teachers will also be unemployed after the last day of class on September 24.
One parent spoken to by The Marlborough Express said his child would join the other students at the school and another set of parents were looking at homeschooling their child.
Montessori is a teaching philosophy based on child-led learning, where children choose how much time they spend on subjects such as maths and English instead of following more strict plans made by teachers.
If there was more interest among parents about Montessori, the trust would look at starting the class again, Mrs Bedford said.
Interest in Montessori classes in the rest of the country was quite high in comparison to Marlborough, she said. She could not pinpoint why Montessori was less popular in Marlborough, but said many parents did not know what happened during classes.
"There's a lot of myth about it. Most parents think it's for bright kids or the not-so-bright kids, but it's for any child. It's just a different way of learning," she said.
"We [the trust] were trying to offer Marlborough a choice – that's the heart-wrenching thing."
The trust had a 12-month contract with the school, which would finish at the end of the term, and also used the school's spare room.
The class would continue if there was enough funding but money from the Ministry of Education and other grants were difficult to source, she said.
Grovetown Montessori teacher Genevieve MacDonald said she had hoped the class would fill up when the classroom opened last year, but had an inkling the numbers were not high enough to continue the class.
A meeting between the board of trustees and the trust would take place soon to discuss how parts of the Montessori programme could be included in the Grovetown School curriculum, she said.
Grovetown School will not be affected by the indefinite closure of the class.
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