The Board of Trustees would like to thank the staff for the huge amount of time, effort and energy they have put into Reboot, this year’s school production. Some of you will have been lucky enough to have seen this already, it opened yesterday, and I’m sure you will have appreciated the amount of work that has gone into the show. It is no easy task bringing together something like this, especially with a school of our size and the staff have done an incredible job.

A big thanks must also go to all the staff and parents who ensured the success of the Years 7&8 camp to Aoraki Mt Cook and Tekapo this term, we’re sure it wasn’t just the children who were exhausted after that.

Community Consultation

As you will be aware, last term the Board of Trustees undertook a comprehensive community consultation process. This involved the gathering of feedback from our various stakeholders in the form of community evenings, parent and student focus groups, staff workshops and a community survey.

The purpose of the community consultation was to review our current key statements (vision, purpose, values, motto and ACTIVE) to ascertain whether they still met our community's aspirations for education at Halswell School. Thank you to everyone who took part in this consultation. It provided the Board with some extremely valuable insights into the direction our community wishes the school to head towards.

Overall, the feedback from stakeholders indicated that our current key statements had become overly complicated and not easily accessible for our children. Another strong theme to emerge was that the current imagery (school logo and values) did not adequately capture the uniqueness and cultural diversity of our school community.

As a result of this feedback, the Board has begun the process of simplifying our key statements down to just a vision and values. This will mean letting go of the existing statements. The Board acknowledges that these statements have played an important role in the development of the school to date (particularly in relation to the rebuild following the Christchurch Earthquakes) but feel that the stakeholder feedback clearly indicates that a more concise vision for teaching and learning and a general re-brand is desired to take Halswell School into the future.

Moving forward, we will be working with our students and a graphic artist over the coming months to design a new school logo and icons to reflect the themes that came out of the consultation.

The new vision and value statements will set the direction for education at Halswell School for the next 5-10 years. Given the importance of this, we are working towards launching this to our community at the beginning of next year. We think this will be an exciting way to get the new school year underway.

We will keep you updated with any developments.

Property Update

As a Board, one of our major areas of focus is to help grow and maintain great spaces for our children, now and into the future. There are a number of projects that our property team hope to have finished within the next six months. This includes spending of additional funds from the Government and includes items such as tree planting along the northern boundary, redevelopment of the boundary bund on Halswell Road, a new natural play area behind Ōrongomai and a Years 0-4 ‘playpod’ to store creative play equipment. Many thanks to our wonderful PTA for the additional funding for a BBQ Courtyard facility, this includes a covered area and pull down blinds to give weather protection. We hope to have this installed in the upcoming school holidays and will be a great addition to our facilities.

The Board met last night regarding the proposed astroturf and its impact on the oak trees. This followed a report from an independent arborist which indicated a greater impact on the remaining trees if four of the trees were to be removed. We have passed a motion to gather some more information before we survey our school community about how to proceed/not proceed with this project. There will be more communication regarding this in Term 3.

Finally, our thanks go to Giarne Harrison for her hard work over the past two years as Board Secretary. Giarne has now passed the reins for this busy role over to Michelle Bishop.

Ngā mihi Nui

Halswell School Board of Trustees