Tēnā koutou katoa, Mālō e lelei, Welcome to Term 3.

WOW, what an amazing Term 2 we had, with so many highlights and achievements for our students. Our first Matariki Awards, our School Ball, a fabulous sports & debating exchange with Waihi College, exciting e-Volocity, Mike King, debating dynamite, Noho Marae, spectacular sports, dynamic drama productions, Manu Kōrero, Pasifika pride demonstrated at the Regional Speech Competition and Pasifika by Nature, as well as some amazing celebrations of success at our school assemblies. Also what a treat Culture Week was, that included our House Pasifika dance competition, Haka and Waiata Contest, chalk drawings and Lip Sync. Congratulations to all our Student Leaders for leading their Houses so well and to all our students who participated in making this week such a success.

I would also like to acknowledge the efforts of our staff and community for their ongoing support. Without all your efforts, encouragement, perseverance and dedication our students would not have the opportunities they do. What an amazing learning community we are part of, thank you for all you do.

Term 3 Changes in Staffing

At the end of Term 2 Mrs Sara Wallace and Mrs Allie Koni left Katikati College to add to their families. As a result there have been a few staffing changes. Mrs Anneka by de Ley, who has been relieving at the College, joined us to teach Junior Science and Digital Technology and Mrs Amanda Besley took on some more Junior Science. Deputy Principal Louise Buckley will be taking the Year 11 Digital Technology students and we have also had to make some internal teacher changes to classes to ensure senior students have access to specialist teachers.

We do not change teachers of classes without careful consideration and good reason and our intention is always to best meet the needs of all of our students. It is our priority to offer students the best possible learning opportunities to ensure that they achieve their personal best. Thank you to all the staff who have been willing to have these changes occur and best wishes to all our students with their Term 3 learning.

‘Make your MARK’

A year ago when I began as Principal at Katikati College we asked questions about our College, our learning, what we valued, and how we could improve. After significant consultation with staff, students and our community we gained valuable insight into what was important to our learning community.

One of the things we identified that we needed to do was to build on the existing successful framework of ARC so that it evolved to better reflect the students in our College now and what they value as learners.

We can confirm our College values have evolved from ARC into MARK. This has seen our school values become Manaakitanga (Care & Relationships), Ako (Learning & Teaching ), Rangatiratanga (Leadership & Ownership) and Kotahitanga (Unity & Togetherness). These Māori values better reflect the bicultural partnership that exists at our College and the type of learners we are striving to develop. The Student Welfare Committee will be looking at ways we can integrate MARK into our existing ARC Framework of systems and processes so it evolves to further support positive learning opportunities for our students. In order that all staff, students and our community have a better understanding of what these values look like, sound like and feel like we will make each of them the theme for our College for a full year. This year’s theme is Manaakitanga.

At a recent school assembly I explained to our students how our College values and our personal values may not be exactly the same, and that this just reflects the diversity we have in our school. What our College values do is help us all understand what we expect of each other while at school. This includes how we talk to each other, how we treat each other and how we act, so that we ensure we are achieving a positive, predictable, consistent and safe learning environment for all our learners.

At the same assembly I also took a quote from the speech given by our Year 11 student Reef Ainsley at the previous assembly ‘Live well, work on yourselves. Don’t be afraid, because the best project you will ever work on is you!’

To the staff at Katikati College our students are our seven year projects. We are here to be their lighthouses and to brightly show them alternative pathways to success and help them navigate their way through the challenging years of adolescence. This is so they are prepared to go into the world and ‘make their MARK’ and achieve personal excellence.

Our Students making their MARK in the world

Congratulations to our Australian Tour Netball Team, Mrs Davies and all their supporters, for their achievements while away. They were 1st in their pool and went into the semi-finals and finished 4th overall. We are very proud of you all.

Louie Campbell and his band Silvera made the top 20 bands for the Smokefree rockquest 2018. This week the top six bands were announced to go through to the Nationals. We are so so excited to announce that Louie’s band “Silvera” was one of these six bands. There were originally 650 bands/soloist/duos entered! They are competing on September 22 in Auckland. Best wishes Louie.

In martial arts, Year 13 student Katie McCormick was recently awarded 2nd Degree Black Belt in Karate and Senior Female Budo Award and Lesen Huirangi was awarded a Gold Medal in the Under 81kg Division in the National Secondary Schools Judo Championships.

We have also had some great results from students for the ICAS Digital Technology Competition. Special congratulations to Rory Robertson for being placed in the top 1% in New Zealand and the Pacific region.

Friday August 10, from 12.20

Our First XV Rugby team has been invited to play the curtain raiser for the BOP Steamers on Friday August 10 at Moore Park. Kick off is at 12.30 and we would like to give all our students the opportunity to attend this game. Lessons will finish at 12.20 on Friday for students. The learning day will consist of four shortened periods so please make sure students are prepared for all four lessons. If your child/children do not wish to attend the Rugby you are welcome to pick them up at 12.20. There will also be staff at the College to supervise any students who do not wish to attend the rugby and cannot be picked up. Please use this link to confirm your child/ children will be needing supervision at school from 12.20 until 3.05.  Our school buses will operate as usual.

Learning Queries

We strongly encourage our whānau, parents and caregivers to work in partnership with our College to support the learning of our students. To further support this an information sheet about who to go to when parents/whānau have questions about their child’s learning has been produced and shared. Information for all our parents wanting to make Learning Queries is available using this link and for our whānau / parents with students in our Whānau Pūmanawa class more information is available using this link. Thank you for all you do to support student learning.

Our Learning in 2019

Student learning will be packaged slightly differently for our senior students in 2019. In an effort to make our learning programmes more flexible, relevant and individualised we will be adapting all our senior courses into semesters. This means that courses will be designed to be completed in 15 weeks, either in A semester or B semester, with most learning areas offering subject courses in both A and B semesters. There will also be a three week period in Term 4 before NCEA exams start for students to obtain specific tutoring and support for their external exams. For example a student may only be sitting external exams in English and Maths, so this may mean they spend the three weeks just working on Maths and English.

We will also be offering a C Semester, which we are calling ‘Mini C’. This semester will be 5 - 6 weeks long and will commence while NZQA exams are on and will offer students additional opportunities to gain internal credits. These courses may include but are not limited to reassessment opportunities to gain credits missed during the year, or to improve on grades that have been achieved, or to undertake completely new stand alone Achievement Standards. We believe that this change will improve the quality of learning and overall student achievement. For example, instead of a students gaining Level 1 NCEA with 120 Achieved Credits, we would like to see them instead gaining 90 Level 1 credits with 50 of these at Merit, so they gain Merit Endorsement overall. Thus student effort goes into improving the quality of the qualification, not just clocking up high numbers of credits.

Some staff are also developing themed courses at Year 11. These courses will offer learning opportunities and credits from at least two learning areas for example a sport themed course may offer students credits in PE, Science and English. More information on these changes will be provided to parents and the community at Senior Options Evening, August 8 and at Future Pathways interviews later in the term

Any questions you may have about these changes can be put into the Community Suggestion Box, which is located on our School Website or you can use this link.

Community Suggestion Box Feedback

Thank you to all those people who have shared their opinions and ideas with us so we can improve our College and what we are doing for our students. We continue to receive lots of great feedback about our uniform and this has all been taken into consideration. We are currently working with potential suppliers to provide real examples of what the uniform will look like and what it will cost. We will keep you informed of our progress.

Other suggestions we have received over the last two months included using Facebook and other social media methods to share information and student achievements plus improving our communication about important dates and highlighting when we have Teacher Only Days better and also a request to have all staff receive ASD training for autistic students so that we are a more inclusive school.

Hopefully we are doing a better job at communicating information to our whānau/ parents and we are using Facebook more effectively to share what is happening in our school with our community. We will continue to seek ways of maximising home school communication and connections.

We have a wide range of learning needs and unfortunately it is not possible to have every staff member receive specific training for all the different learning needs our college students have We do the very best we can with the resources available to ensure all staff working with students who have specific needs are trained and have access to the available resourcing and to Ministry of Education experts. We strive to always be inclusive and make decisions to best meet the learning needs of all our learners, who number approximately 900 students.

What’s to come in Term 3

We have Senior Options evening on August 8, followed by our First XV Rugby on August 10, our open evening for those considering joining the College is August 22. Future Pathway Interviews are on August 30, our Winter Tournament for our Sports Teams is on September 3 - 8, and AIMs games for our Year 7 and 8 Sports Teams are on September 9 - 14. Senior school exams are from September 17 - 21,  our Pasifika Fiafia Evening is on September 30, and in the last week of term we have Sports week. So, another action packed term ahead, with lots of opportunities for our students to ‘Make their MARK’.

Nāku noa na

Carolyn Pentecost

Principal Katikati College