Amesbury Digest - 24th October 2022

Kia ora koutou,

It has been a very focused and energetic start to our final term. Our big inquiry showcase is next week (see this article for more detail) and kaiako and ākonga have got back into the preparation and planning of this very quickly. It has been great to see such energy about the place, and I’m certainly excited to attend the different performances and learn new things about the different regions around the world. It is also lovely to see some new faces around the school; a big Amesbury welcome to our new families, we hope you settle in well and quickly feel at home here.

Some good news from last term - so far we have made a profit of just under $4,000 from the fundraising completed at the Kapa Haka Festival last term. We are off to a great start on our fundraising for a school pou. A pou is a carved wooden post used to mark places of significance; here are some examples. We are looking to have a pou or waharoa created for the entrance of our school, and we are forming a group of people who will work together to make this happen. The fundraising from the festival marks a good start to our mahi. To help contribute to this, you can order your hangi family take out meals from the Kindo school shop for our school community gathering on 18th Nov. CJ's Hangi is contributing an amount from each meal back to the school, and all money raised will go towards our school pou - thanks CJ's Hangi! 

Thank you all for your patience and understanding around the closing of the car park on Friday. The situation was quite a stressful one for our neighbours, who were very worried about the risk their tree posed to our school community. Closing the car park to parents and visitors was the best way to ensure safety for everyone, as it meant we could close off one whole section around the potential danger. We appreciate that this was an inconvenience for people, so thank you for your consideration around this.

Finally, we have had a marked increase in instances of graffiti and damage to school property over the past couple of months. Our security cameras help us with being able to see what happened and who was involved. However, we sadly have not been able to identify any perpetrators to date. As we move into summer and there are more people around in the evenings, it may be that people in our school community are out and about when things are happening at school. If you see any suspicious behaviour around the school or the construction site, please do let me know (urs@amesbury.school.nz) or call the Police 105 number. Hopefully, we can all work together to keep our school grounds a safe and well kept place for everyone. Thank you for your help with this.

Have a lovely week, and we hope to see many of you at our school showcase on Tuesday or Thursday this week.

Ngā mihi nui,

Urs Cunningham