Amesbury Digest - 28th June 2021

Kia ora koutou,

Many thanks to you all for your support with our teacher paid union meeting last week. The majority of tamariki (children) were collected early, allowing most teachers to attend the meeting on Tuesday afternoon. Students who needed to stay at school were signed up on our online form, making it easy for us to plan for the afternoon and ensure we had enough teachers staying at school. We really appreciate the help and support you showed our kaiako (teachers). 

Wellington is currently at alert level 2 until 11:59pm on Tuesday 29th June, due to the recent case of the visitor with Covid-19. Thank you to you all for following our level 2 protocols at school. These expectations are clearly laid out in this article, and we ask that you let any whānau members or friends who visit school or pick up your child/ren know of these expectations. Please try to avoid coming into school buildings unless it is necessary to do so, and please remind all whānau members picking up students at school to do the same, even when the weather is poor. If you do need to enter school buildings, please ensure you sign in and sanitise as you enter and leave. 

We will remain in alert level 2 currently until 11:59pm on Tuesday 29th June. Please be aware that if this is extended beyond Tuesday, we are likely to postpone any events for later in the week that will cause additional gatherings of parents onsite at school. We will reschedule the events we postponed from last week once we move back to alert level 1.

With the continued alert level 2 status, we remind people to stay vigilant for signs of sickness. Stay at home if unwell and get tested if you show any signs of Covid-19. 

Key information: Healthline  0800 358 5453

Ministry of Health information site

Key links for communications and learning information

We have a lot of different events and learning programmes running at school, and we do understand that it can be tricky to navigate around different communication points for planning and key information about school events. We endeavour to make these processes as clear and streamlined as possible. Here is a list of the key places to go to for important information:

1) Communications from school:

* All communications are sent out through our learning management system, HERO. The default setting of this tool is for you to receive notifications to all devices you have logged with HERO - most likely the email contact that you have shared with school, and your mobile phone. You can change this setting on your HERO account to push notifications only to email, if preferred. If you are having trouble receiving communication notifications in the form that you would prefer, please contact John (communications@amesbury.school.nz) for further support.

* We try to ‘bundle’ all communications into one weekly digest so you are generally only receiving one main communication or notice alert each week from school, apart from individual learning post alerts for your children. This is to try and reduce the number of notifications and messages from school, and means you have one key place to go for all information and events - the weekly digest.  The digest contains a set of articles each week about different events and information, and it will also have a ‘Notices’ article with all the current information about what is happening or coming up at school. Each digest will usually begin with an editorial from Urs. 

* In the brief notification message sent out each week to signal a digest being posted, John will list all the articles contained within the digest, to make it easier for parents to locate the information that is pertinent to them.

2) Planning for each team: The link to the planning site can be found on the home page of the school website, top right hand corner - click on the book icon. Click on the relevant term and then scroll to find the hub you are looking for. There is one weekly timetable displayed for each hub, with the key planning links continued within each timetable.

3) Key dates and information: The school calendar can be found on the home page of the school website. It contains all events and activities. The calendar can also be found on the main main of your LINC-ED Hero account.

Events coming up

We have postponed a number of events due to our move into alert level 2. Once we move back to alert level 1 we will reschedule these events and communicate those new dates with you.

- Wednesday 30th June: Board of Trustees meeting. 5:30pm in the school meeting room

- Thursday 1st July: Newlands Intermediate Information Evening. 7:30pm at Newlands Intermediate

- Friday 2nd July: Amesbury’s Got Talent Final: Amesbury Hall 5:30 - 6:30pm

- Tuesday 6th July: Regional Cross Country competition

- Wednesday 7th July: Report comments go live on HERO

- Friday 9th July: Term 2 ends. School finishes at 3pm

Kia pai tō wiki - have a good week as we head rapidly towards the end of term 2.

Ngā mihi nui,

Urs Cunningham