Principal's Message T2 Wk 5
Kia ora
I hope that this message finds you well. It is hard to believe that we are fast approaching June and that we are nearly halfway through the school year for Year 12 and 13 students! Yesterday I spent most of the day in classrooms and it was great to see students settled and engaged in learning. I particularly enjoyed seeing the work of Year 9 students who were learning about the history of Aotearoa/New Zealand. Staff have been heavily engaged in planning and implementing the Aotearoa/New Zealand Histories Curriculum, which will be fully implemented from next year. It was reinvigorating to be in classrooms as the vast majority of my time over the past few weeks has been primarily focused on two things: buildings and staffing.
Buildings
You will have seen the letter which the Board of Trustees Presiding Member, Vanessa-Amy Greenwood, sent to all parents (and was made available to the wider community) regarding the frustration around the redevelopment. You may also have seen her on TV1 Breakfast, heard her interview on Newstalk ZB or read the article on the front page of the Selwyn Times. The Board has been working hard advocating strongly on behalf of our community to ensure that buildings fit-for-purpose for a 21st century education are delivered as quickly as possible. Over the past 2 years, members of the SLT, key staff and Board of Trustees members have spent hundreds of hours in design meetings and thousands of hours of discussions to ensure that the design of our new learning spaces will amplify our current learning design. Currently there is a $30M shortfall in funding to be able to deliver our new school in the 1.5 year timeline which was originally proposed. The alternative is to start the build as soon as possible and use the money available (which was tagged in 2019 for the redevelopment) with the hope of accessing funding from annual budgets to complete the project. Should this approach be taken then best case scenario would be completion of the redevelopment in Term 1, 2028. What was a simple design and build has now fast become a major headache and is impacting directly on the morale of staff and students and our ability to fully implement and amplify our learning design.
Staffing
There are shortages of teachers in EVERY subject in New Zealand. We are in the midst of the worst teacher staffing shortage in living memory. Today there are 40 adverts for secondary teachers in Canterbury listed in the Education Gazette. It has been like this for most of the year with schools scrambling to be able to find teachers to teach students. It is nearly impossible to fill vacancies which are fixed term and we are getting extremely small numbers of applicants (2-3) for permanent positions. Showing prospective employees around a school which is in disrepair (due to decisions made by the Ministry of Education over the past 6 years) is demoralising and only adds to the problem.
You may ask why we cannot just make everyone permanent? We cannot make staffing positions permanent as should the school roll drop (which it did over the past 2 years due to high availability of local jobs) then we may find ourselves in a CAPNA (Curriculum and Pastoral Needs Analysis) Process which would identify the needs of the school and teaching staff who may need to be made redundant. It sometimes feels like we are in the midst of a perfect storm and unfortunately it means that I am going to have to make some very difficult and highly challenging leadership decisions, which may mean not being able to run some courses for the second half of the year.
Staffing Update:
Maxine van Brakel - Food Technology - has accepted a permanent position teaching at Rolleston College. Maxine was appointed to a 1 year fixed term position covering Tessa Collins who is on refreshment leave. Maxine is a fantastic teacher who is new to the profession and we wish her well at her new school which she will start teaching at next term.
Despite all this, I remain as optimistic as possible as the vast majority of our young people are fantastic, produce some amazing work and do the right thing all day, every day. Our teaching staff work incredibly hard to come up with lessons to engage students in multiple ways, using learning design based on Universal Design for Learning - which has been one of the main foci for our professional development over the past 2 years. There is no reason for students to be disengaged as they have more input into the learning design than they have ever had before. We continue to articulate high expectations for learning and behaviour, despite the increasingly complex demands that staff are working under, and we will continue to do so as our young people are worth it!
Ngā mihi
Ronan Bass
Tumuaki/Principal