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Our teachers are urging the government to make an offer that improves terms and conditions to a level that will ease the teacher shortage and ensure a settled year for our ākonga. Thank you for your support over our very difficult decision to roster home students and close the school. Hopefully, it will be sorted soon

Ka Ora Ka Ako (Healthy Lunches programme)

The interested group from Westport visited us last week and we are feeling relatively confident that we will be able to employ them. Once we have the team in place we will be looking closely at the logistics of how we feed 600+ students every day.

Attendance

The Ministry has recently changed how we measure attendance using "regular attendance." Please see below:

The key measure of attendance is the proportion of students who attend regularly, that is, the percentage of students who have attended more than 90% of half-days. A half-day can either be the minimum two hours before, or after, noon contributing to the minimum four hours of a school day.

We will be working towards changing our attendance reporting using the above definition. It's definitely a different way to look at how we measure attendance so we need to work with our staff and our community on the changes. Thanks for your understanding on this.

Year 9s

We have been supporting our Year 9s to transition to high school in a positive way. Our SLT visited all of our Year 9s classes individually on Friday to ensure that everyone hears the same message and we thank you in advance for supporting us with these messages.

Grey High is a great school and nearly everyone is doing the right thing - turning up on time, following our values, staying calm and being kind but we need to remind you of some key things:

1. No racist, sexist or anti gay language. This is not acceptable as language is very important and we expect everyone to talk to each other in a kind way. If you hear people talking like this, be an upstander and ask them to stop but if you can’t do this please talk to a trusted adult and we will.

2. Keep your hands and feet to yourself and do not touch anyone else’s property.

3. If someone is winding you up you need to walk aways and find a trusted adult and we will sort it out.

4. Vaping is illegal for under 18s and vaping on the school site is illegal for everyone

5. Phones - it is a privilege to be allowed to have your phone at school. If you use it in class it will be confiscated and your family will have to pick it up

If we continue to have any more issues with phones, Year 9s will not be allowed to bring them to school.

Again, thanks for your support

Samantha Mortimer

Principal Greymouth High School

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