Kia ora koutou

A little bit of an update:

We have been waiting excitedly for the budget, hoping that we would find out whether our school is considered a priority for some new classrooms. The budget came out and 200 new classrooms have been funded. However, no indication was given in the budget about where these classrooms would be built. I know people are eager to find out what is happening in relation to this, so I emailed the Ministry to find out. I received the following answer:

“The details of national decisions are being worked through at the moment. This includes roll growth classrooms, new schools and school extensions. We anticipate announcements being made over coming months. Locally we’ve worked out our region’s growth priorities, which includes your school, and now we are awaiting confirmation of national priorities. Once we know more, we’ll let you know.”

Hence, we now know no more than we did previously and we will just need to continue waiting patiently. Although we are well over-subscribed at the moment with quite a few more children due to come in over this year, we do feel that the situation is tolerable and the infrastructure can still cope.

Congratulations to a number of our teachers, who presented to the Board last night about a range of teaching and learning matters. Kieron and Derek spoke about a recent course they had attended about boys and their learning. Gemma, Demelza, Lisa, (in abstentia), Hazel, Georgia and Derek each shared their main learnings from the conference in Melbourne and what they are now doing differently with their students as a result. They were amazing! I was very proud as I listened to how much they care about students and their learning and with how intelligently they spoke about education and the insight they exhibited.

It was a pleasure to welcome Dr Jan Robertson here this week to work with leaders from our cluster of schools on coaching leadership. About 40 principals and leaders from 8 schools attended. It was great to host this event.

It has been a very busy week, so that is all from me today. I hope you are coping with the beginning of winter and you are managing to keep the bugs at bay.

Nga mihi nui ki a koutou

Lesley