From our Tumuaki / Principal

Kia ora e te whānau,

We are definitely feeling the effects of winter creeping closer, with dark mornings and cold and wet weather. There are lots of bugs and winter illnesses around, so please stay safe and keep yourselves and your tamariki (children) at home if you see signs of sickness. We are noticing that families are being vigilant about staying home when sick - thanks for doing this, as it helps you to get better sooner, and it helps to prevent spreading bugs around. We have several children at school who are at higher risk of serious illness if they pick up winter chills and bugs, so thank you for helping to keep us all safe as a community.

This week the team and I have had discussions with all ākonga (students) in Pōhutukawa Hub about using derogatory language about other people around race, skin colour and physical features. Given the serious nature of this topic, I feel it is important to let whānau know about these discussions, so that we can all be part of these ongoing conversations with our tamariki (children).

We are now aware of several different situations involving different ākonga using derogatory language about how people look or about different cultures, language and tikanga (customs). While we have talked with the individual children involved in these situations, we took the conversation wider this week, to include the whole hub, given that this involved several different situations and different ākonga (students). As we discussed with our ākonga, this involves all of us and we all need to be aware of what is acceptable and what is not acceptable. We all need to be very clear on the language we should expect ourselves to use, and what we should expect from others around us. We strongly encouraged ākonga to talk with teachers at school if they hear anything they think is not okay. Failing that, if they don’t feel comfortable doing this, we reminded them to talk with whānau at home about it, so that whānau can then reach out and let us know.

During this discussion, ākonga seemed to be clear about how we treat each other and what we can do if we hear things that are not okay. At school we will be monitoring this carefully, and continuing to integrate this learning into our wider learning programmes in an ongoing way. It is good for you to know that we have had these discussions at school. If your child says anything at home that you feel would be good for us to know, please do get in touch with your tamariki’s whānau teacher, or with Emma (team leader) or myself.

With plenty of rain forecast over the next few days, I hope you all stay warm and dry over the weekend. Perhaps this is a good chance to hunker down and enjoy some time indoors with whānau and friends.

Hei tērā wiki, see you next week.

Ngā mihi nui, 

Urs Cunningham