Kia ora e te whanau!

I hope this message finds you and your family safe and healthy.  Once again, the past few weeks have certainly tested our resilience as a nation.  As you know, the lockdown came without any notice.  Back on 17th August, after school, I was going about my parent duties of dropping my son at a sports practice, the next minute our PM announced to the nation that we were going into Alert Level 4 that night.  I have been so impressed with how our staff responded.  They had a couple of days to plan a Home Learning programme before launching this on Monday 23rd August.  

We absolutely appreciate that every family will have their unique challenges to deal with through the lockdown.  Our goal has been to prioritise wellbeing and to provide learning tasks that are engaging, authentic, fun and can be done independently.  We also knew from last year that our students enjoyed having opportunities to connect with each other and their teacher/s have done an amazing job at providing regular opportunities to connect online.  

We are now at Alert Level 3 which means we are open for "Bubble School".  In other words, we have students and staff onsite in bubble classes, completing home learning while being supervised by a teacher.  We currently have 5 bubble classes with up to 10 students in each bubble class, located in various buildings around the school.    We have very strict safety measures in place to keep everyone safe and these protocols are set by the Ministry of Health and communicated to schools by the Ministry of Education.  We now await the next steps which will be communicated with the country on Monday next week.  From that point, we will be better placed to plan accordingly.  In the meantime, home learning continues and if you need anything at all, please don't hesitate to get in contact with your child's HB teacher or our office.

Noho ora mai nā (Stay well / take care of yourself)

Rob Rush

Principal / Tumuaki