Principal’s word – Term 1 Week 1

Welcome back to you all! 

What a joy it has been to see all of our students this week. Today was the first day that everyone was back at school and we marked this with a whole school mihi whakatau at the front of our building.  Our new prefects stepped up in their first official duty for the year ably supported by Marie Donaldson and Nicole Solomon. A big thank you to Main School Principal, Paul Cartlidge, who handed over the new students to us. We finished the mihi whakatau with shared kai which was prepared by our new canteen staff.  

We have had great feedback from the students about the new menu. We will be publishing the menus each fortnight and so far the food has been delicious AND healthy with very little waste! 

As well as new students, we also welcome new staff to the school. Kylie Cooper, has joined us from Waihao Downs school in our office; Juliet Ferretti has joined Ngaio Stewart in the canteen and we also welcome back Miriam Morton as our new Arts Coordinator. Mark Muller joins our teaching staff this year and is teaching Maths and PE and Andrew Carswell returns to teach Science and Maths. 

Some great news is that we have had the best set of NCEA results in over 5 years! Our 2022 NCEA Level 1 results have improved over 30% on last years results! What an achievement for our students and a big thank you to staff who helped them get there. I will post more about this in a later article.

Just a wee reminder about COVID. If your child gets COVID they have to stay home for 7 days. If anyone else in your household gets COVID then your child needs to test every day for 5 days and can still come to school as long as they are testing negative. If you are not sure please contact the school. As usual, please keep us advised as early as possible if your child is going to be off school. 

Some other news to be aware of is that our teachers are currently undertaking partial strike action. This means that they are not covering extra classes when people are sick or away at camps etc. Usually we try to use external relievers, but this is not always possible. The implication of this is that if external relievers are not available then we may not be able to run school camps. We will do our best to make sure camps run but cannot do this if the school cannot be staffed safely. In the unlikely event that we have a lot of staff sickness that cannot be covered by external relievers then I will endeavour to keep the school open by reshuffling classes. However, I need to make you aware that we may need to roster home students but I will keep you posted if this is looking likely. 

Please keep an eye on our calendar as we have ‘meet and greets’ coming up and it will be great to see you all there.

Enjoy the lovely long weekend,

Jo