Kia ora koutou. Talofa. Kia Orana. Malo e lelei. Bula Vinaka. Fakaalofa atu. Namaste. Kumusta. Haere mai ki Te Kura Huruhuru Ao o Horomaka. Warm greetings to the Hornby High School community.

To be successful all groups or organisations have to hold to an agreed set of values. It doesn’t matter what sort of group they are, business, local government, motorcycle gang, military unit, or … school. We need to have a shared set of values.

Schools take their values from the New Zealand Curriculum, values that have been distilled from the generally accepted values and principles that we share across Aotearoa New Zealand.

Our Hornby High School interpretation of those values are Commitment, Achievement, Resilience, and Respect; we display these values proudly in all that we do and reference back to them in our dealing with each other and with our rangatahi.

You may then be able to imagine my distress, which I have to say verged on anger, at the incredibly disrespectful comments that appeared on our social media page after we posted photographs of two of our students meeting with our Local MP Dr Megan Woods, and Prime Minister The Right Honorable Jacinda Ardern, on Friday.  There we were celebrating some of our many amazing young people, their meeting saying a lot about who they are and what they have already achieved, when members of the broader community made incredibly rude and disrespectful remarks.

These are your children, your ‘babies’. You love them because they are your own. It is our life’s work to help them to grow into wonderful young people who hold to our community’s agreed values. We celebrate their achievements, and we post those achievements on social media because they are worthy (as are all of our students). Many of the rude comments came from individuals whom we identified as not belonging to our own Hornby parent community. Shame on them. As a consequence we have blocked a number of individuals from our Facebook page. Our young people deserve the best, and as adults we are the ones who have a moral obligation to look after them, to nurture them, to support their amazing journeys to adulthood, and to give them the best.

There was no respect there. Using young people to make dubious and spurious claims is in my opinion the lowest of the low. Those comments say everything about the commenters, and nothing about our young people and our kura.

For the vast majority of people who understand, who respect our young people and who support them, thank you. In these ever more challenging times when we are under increasing attack from elements of extremism, our values may well be all that stand between us and chaos. It is most certainly true that our shared values will hold us together, and help to protect us from this awful abuse.

Please make sure you follow us on Facebook for the latest and most up to date news https://www.facebook.com/hornbyhighschool/ , and on our website www.hornby.school.nz . You can also follow my thinking our education journey at Hornby High School, and more generally, on my blog at https://whakataukihewakaekenoa.blogspot.co.nz/

Kia tau te mauri

Robin Sutton