A huge thank you to all the whānau, families and staff members who looked after students last Friday night, who were stuck at school as a result of the flash flooding in the Mangawhai area. It is reassuring to know that our communities rally together in times of need. I am pleased to see that the Brynderwyns has now reopened for North-bound traffic and hopefully we will see more roads opening in the coming week.

Uniform: A reminder that students need to be in the correct uniform when at school and on the school buses. I am seeing a number of students wearing Crocs, or Birkenstock type sandals to school. These are not allowed. Please see our website for full details on our uniform regulations.

New Classrooms: I am pleased to see that work has now begun on setting up the six new classrooms on the field near A-block. This project is expected to take 10 weeks to complete, so we should have these ready for learning early in May. The senior English department will move into four of these classrooms, with the other two being used by the year 7/8 syndicate teachers. This field is currently out of bounds to students.

Staff Only Day: A reminder that next Friday the 10th March is a staff only day. This is a professional development day where teachers and some support staff will learn about KIVA, the new bullying prevention programme that we are introducing this year. KIVA is research based and supports the NZ Health and PE curriculum. There are three main aspects of KIVA: prevention, intervention and monitoring. Additional training will be provided to the syndicate teachers who will be directly involved in teaching the KIVA lessons to our year  7 and 8 students. If this programme is successful we will look at rolling this out to our year 9s next year.

Measles: You may have seen in the media that there has recently been a confirmed case of measles in New Zealand.  As measles is highly infectious we want to be prepared.  Health New Zealand has advised us that if our school is exposed to an infectious person, all students and staff without evidence of MMR vaccinations will have to stay at home for two weeks. This would be extremely disruptive to all concerned. If your child has received their MMR vaccine and you have yet to advise the school of this, please provide your child's MMR vaccine record to the office at your earliest convenience. Please see link for more information. Thank you.

Construction Academy: Our senior construction academy students have started on a school based project that will see these students gaining some valuable real world experience. They will be putting a new concrete path through the garden between D-block and the admin area. These students are learning not only about the construction side of the work, but also the health and safety requirements that go into projects such as these. I am looking forward to seeing the finished product. With their teacher Mr Trail overseeing this, I am sure it will be completed to a high standard.

Goal Setting: Next Wednesday, all of our Year 11-13 students will be setting their goals. In whānau groups, we will first discuss what a SMART goal is and why it is important that both short term and long term goals are set. Students will set both academic and personal goals. I encourage you to speak to your students, over the next few days, about what they are aiming to achieve this year and how they plan to get there. Some examples of academic goals are to achieve Level 2 NCEA endorsed with merit, to pass NCEA Level 1 or to gain an excellence course endorsement in Level 3 painting. Personal goals may be to learn to play a new instrument, gain a drivers' license, study more at home, play in a particular sports team, or get a part-time job. We plan to carry out goal setting with Y9-10 in term 2, once they have learned how our new junior certificate and diploma system will work.

GRIP Conference: This week Adrian Cooling, Deputy Principal (Pastoral) had the pleasure of taking our school prefects to a student leadership conference in Auckland.  A great day for all summed up well by prefect Kate Cotching

“On the 2nd of March, the prefect group travelled to Auckland for the GRIP Leadership conference held in Manukau. GRIP Leadership is an organisation that specialises in student leadership and running interactive programs that are relevant and applicable to the situations that school leaders and prefects are put in every day. There were many fun activities and games as well as sessions on how to be great school leaders. We were taught how to get everyone participating in events, how to make students feel valued, raise new ideas within school and to make our school a great place for everybody. We all learnt a lot of valuable and useful things from this day and taught us skills that can allow us to make significant contributions to our school.”

The event was also attended by  several other schools from Auckland and Northland.  I would like to congratulate all our prefects for doing a fantastic job representing Otamatea High School.

From the Archives - November 1991 (NZ Herald)

If you have any memories, memorabilia or photos you think we might be interested in having in our archives, please contact huia.coll@otamatea.school.nz