Principal's News

COVID: I am pleased to see our attendance rate for the first week of term 4 up to 87%. However, COVID continues to circulate throughout our community and a number of our staff and students have tested positive recently, so please remain vigilant. Positive cases still need to self-isolate for 7 days but asymptomatic household contacts can return to school subject to daily RATs. If your child displays COVID symptoms at school, it remains our policy to contact parents/caregivers to collect their child as soon as possible. We do have spare RATs available if needed.

Coming Up: We have a very busy couple of weeks leading up to senior prizegiving on Friday the 4th November. Please note that there is no school for our year 7, 8 and 9 students on this day. This coming week, students will be voting for our 2023 prefects, years 10 - 12 students will start making their 2023 senior option choices, and all students will begin completing their classroom surveys. We value student feedback and these surveys will give students a chance to voice their feelings about the progress they are making in class, their engagement in class, and how they feel their teachers are supporting their learning. After senior prize-giving, NCEA examinations begin and seniors who are well on track to passing their NCEA will be granted study leave. The remaining seniors will stay at school, and supported to complete outstanding work and earn additional credits.

Library Furniture: Our new library furniture arrived this week and it looks fantastic. Thank you to our amazing PCTA for providing the funds for this purchase. It is very much appreciated. Our librarian Imogen has received the thumbs-up from our students, who described the furniture as "cool", "very nice", "awesome", " comfy" and "mint".  According to Imogen the colours, although vibrantly named Dolly Peacock and Blaze Jungle, are sedate and work well with the library and its current colour schemes. They are not fixed, with each component able to be rearranged or repositioned, and even added to at a later date, creating different combinations depending on requirements. We intend on adding additional furniture to the library next year.

Head Boy: Well done to our head boy Michael Ferguson who featured in a Stuff article about voting eligibility for under 18 year olds. Michael makes a strong case for lowering the voter age and it is fantastic seeing one of our students articulating himself so well about this topic. You can read the full article here.

Life Saver: I was very proud to read about one of our ex students, Bailey Hudson, who recently saved a man from drowning in the Kai Iwi Lakes. Bailey is a Waipū Cove surf lifeguard and managed to rescue and resuscitate a man who had lost consciousness in the water. You can read the article here. Well done Bailey!

New Classrooms: I am pleased to report that we have secured six additional classrooms for next year. With our school roll expected to climb to 620 students next year, we simply would not have the space to accommodate the extra students otherwise. Over the next 3 months, the Ministry of Education will be securing the services of a modular classroom contractor who will be engaged to do the dis-establishment from the current site, move and store the buildings, complete the building consent documents including site establishments, service connections etc, and complete all the required on site works. Our property team will be meeting next week to look at a suitable site for these new classrooms.

Cellphones at School next year: Thank you to all parents and caregivers who completed the survey on the proposed schoolwide cellphone ban for all year 7 to 10 students from the start of next year. We received over 150 responses which gives us a very clear picture on how our community feels about cellphone use at school. 16% of the respondents wanted our cell phone policy relaxed (allowed in the classroom at the teacher's discretion), 31% were happy with the status quo, and just over half wanted tighter restrictions on some or all year levels. When ordering the responses from least restrictive to most restrictive, the "median" response was to keep the status quo for seniors, but to introduce a complete ban for juniors. I will be taking this to our board meeting next week for further discussion.

Chromebooks 2023: A reminder that all year 10 to 13 students will need to bring a Chromebook in a hard shell case 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 good deals available. See our website: Our School => Student Chromebooks for more details.

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.

Dirk Smyth
Principal