Principal's News

COVID: Our current attendance rate is sitting at 85%, which is now only 5% short of our minimum attendance target of 90%. Please do not keep your child at home unless they are unwell. Many of our students have missed large chunks of work due to absenteeism this year, and now is the time to get back on track. The Covid-19 traffic light system and mask requirements on school transport have now ended and we have resumed singing at school assemblies. Asymptomatic household contacts no longer need to self-isolate, and can return to school subject to daily RATs. With winter behind us I am hopeful that we will continue to see an increase in attendance rates over the rest of the year.

Staff Only Day: On Wednesday our teachers and teacher aides participated in our 'relationships first' professional development programme. This programme, run by Cognition Education, supports teachers (and teacher aides) to build respectful, professional relationships with students, with a specific emphasis on marginalised students. It is based on over a decade’s worth of research and is considered to be one of the most powerful contributions to educational research and practice in the past 50 years. It was a very productive day and our staff got a lot out of it.

Market Day: Well done to all those students who were involved in Market Day on Thursday. The hall was packed during first interval, with long queues for many of the delicous food items that were for sale. Our students were responsible for the marketing, preparation and sale of their products and it was a very succesful day. I personally enjoyed some delicious sushi and a very tasty cream donut.

Chromebooks 2023: A reminder that all year 10 to 13 students will need to bring a Chromebook to school each day from the start of 2023. We encourage you to support our amazing local supplier 100% Fergus Appliances for your Chromebook purchase, but we have also partnered with PB Tech and Cyclone who have some excellent good deals available. See our website: Our School => Student Chromebooks for more details.

NCEA Exams: The final week of this term (starting Tuesday 27th September as Monday 26th is now a public holiday) is our practice NCEA examination week. These examinations are very important. They provide students with an opportunity to practice their end of year assessments under proper examination conditions, and it identifies those areas that students still need to work on. If students pass their practice exam, then these results can be used as a derived grade for students who may become sick on the end of year examination date. These results also count towards our end of year prizes such as Dux and first in class. It is therefore imperative that students prepare adequately for these examinations. I strongly suggest putting the long weekend prior to exam week aside for exam preparation, especially for those students with many papers to sit. Exam timetable 

Olla Podriga: What a fantastic night we had on Tuesday, as Olla Podriga made its reappearance after a three year absence due to COVID restrictions. It was a wonderfully entertaining evening and I was so proud of our students, all of whom showed a great deal of courage performing on stage. Well done to our winners Seki Usos, as well as to Patient People, The Rubber Bands (who won the People's Choice award) and Melanie Turner-Bennett who were our runners up.

Lockdown Practice: We had a lockdown practice this morning. A number of schools in New Zealand have been forced into lockdown in recent months, showing the importance of schools having robust procedures in place for such situations. Our staff and students followed our procedures as expected, and were released from lockdown after about half an hour in their classrooms. I was very happy with our procedures and I am confident that we are prepared for any future lockdown.

Policy Review: Each term a number of school policies come up for review, as part of our triennial review programme. If you wish to provide any recommendations on these policies, please click on this link, The username is Otamatea, and the password is bickerstaffe. We value your feedback.

Ngā mihi
Dirk Smyth