Kia ora whānau

With the earthquakes and tsunami mainly affecting the East Coast of the North Island, it is timely to remind you that all Heaton procedures, including our emergency procedures, can be found on our Heaton website. Click onto the “Our School” tab at the top and you will see how to access these. Later in the month we will be practising our Lockdown procedure with our consultants, Harrision Tew. We will let you know when this is happening. Be assured our staff are well trained and will take good care of your children should we be in an emergency situation. Please note that we do require students to be physically collected from the school by Caregiver 1 or 2 in the event of an emergency situation. You will be kept regularly up to date via our school app, our email tree and/the front page of the Heaton website. If you have not downloaded our school app, we advise you to do so.

The Year 7 activities days are well underway and are being enjoyed by our students and teachers. Many thanks to parents/whānau who have come along to provide support.

The Heaton swimming sports was a very successful event. We have some amazing swimmers. Thank you to Tim Evers and our Heaton team.

Well done to our students who completed in the tennis tournament.

Already issues to do with inappropriate use of social media are coming my way. As parents/whānau it is essential that you are keeping a very close track of what your child is doing on social media. Our students are often not mature enough to be able to think through the implications of the hurt and damage that can be done via social media and hence need the adults in their lives to be closely supervising this.

Vaping is another increasing concern. Like social media, this is happening out of school, often using an adult’s vaping equipment. It is harmful to a growing early adolescent. It seems to be the “cool” thing to do at the moment so please talk to your child about the harm they are causing themselves. Students should be going straight home after school as hanging out in groups till quite late in the afternoon and not being involved in a purposeful activity such as playing a sport, can lead to undesirable behaviour.

We have a vacancy on our Board of Trustees for another member. This is a very important role in our school. If you are interested or want to know more about the role please contact me. There are exciting times ahead for us.

Ngā mihi

Andrea Knight, Principal