It is now early March, and a belated welcome from me. I hope the start of the year has gone well for you all. A new school year is full of new hopes, dreams and challenges. At week five, our dreams are still intact.

In reality, we have had a wonderful start to the school year. All the planning we did at the end of 2019 has paid off and all teachers (Barr one!) started Term 1 ready for the excited return of students. The one teacher missing is  Mrs Nicki Barr who is still recovering from her broken arm. We still hope to see her back with us early in term 2. Fingers and toes crossed. Our replacement teacher James Marwick is doing a wonderful job in her absence.

As I am publishing this article we are finalising the school Charter for 2020. This will hopefully be approved at the next BOT meeting (March 10th) and will be available on our website soon thereafter. The Charter is the contract between the school and the Ministry of Education. The main Goals for 2020 are .....

1. Modernising our school curriculum.
2. Building student capability as self managing learners.
3. Enhancing culturally enriching practices.
4. Building stronger community connection.

We hope you will see evidence of all these goals in the actions and practices around the school.

Already this term we have had two well attended Community Sharing Days. One for the Junior school and another for Senior. It has been great to see the shared nature of these days. Parents, grandparents and students all working together. A lovely family school experience.

We have also had the excitement of two very successful sports events. Both involving students in our senior school. The first was the senior school swimming sports, the second our community Triathlon. Again wonderful organisation, brilliant support from our school community and excellent performance by a huge number of students.

This week we began or school reporting process with Parent Teacher conferences. These are intended to establish a strong working partnership between parents (the first teachers) and staff at the school. We had these in the second week of school last year, but on reflection decided that these would be much more useful if the teachers had just a little more time to get to know children. I hope you are all finding these useful. We have also lengthened the interviews to 15mins. For this reason we decided we needed to finish school early on Wednesday afternoon (2pm) to ensure we could complete interviews in a reasonable timeframe. We are sorry if late notification has caused a problem. We will get this right for future interviews. (Next ones scheduled for week 1 Term 3.)

In the last month there has been a huge amount of media coverage to the Coronavirus.(COVID-19). As at writing this 90,000 cases worldwide with 3,087 deaths. This is clearly a serious virus that is causing a significant impact across a range of sectors.  (Health, business and financial markets.) Fortunately, it has not yet spread into the wider New Zealand communities. At the school we are already well into planning an appropriate response of this was to become a major pandemic. Clearly in this instance we would take instruction from the Ministry of Health as well as Ministry ofEducation. There are strong pandemic plans in place if required.

In the meantime it is probably helpful to just reinforce with children the following reminders regarding hand washing. Our best defence around any virus.  Good habits will keep us all safer in the long run.

Enjoy the rest of the term and a big thank you in advance to all the families who have volunteered to attend the Year 5 & 6 school camp to Wainui. I'm sure you will have a lovely trip.

Thanks

David Taylor. Principal

Hand washing

Wash hands for 20 seconds. Dry hands for 20 seconds.

Steps for clean hands

1. Wet your hands under clean running water. Use warm water if available.

2. Put soap on your hands and wash for 20 seconds. Liquid soap is best.

3. Rub hands together until the soap makes bubbles.

4. Rub on both sides of both hands ...

5. and in between fingers and thumbs ...

6. and round and round both hands.

7. Rinse all the soap off under clean running water. Use warm water if available.

8. Dry your hands all over for 20 seconds. Using a paper towel is best (or, if at home, a clean dry towel).

Always wash and dry your hands ...

Before

· Eating or preparing food.

After

· Sneezing, coughing or blowing your nose (or wiping children’s noses)

· Gardening (or playing outside for children)

· Having contact with animals

· Going to the toilet or changing nappies

· Looking after sick people.