Tēnā koutou katoa, Mālō e lelei

Welcome back to Term Three. I trust you have all had a relaxing break and are ready for the exciting and busy term that lies ahead of us. Term Two was a big term and there was so much to celebrate as you can see from all the student success stories shared in the newsletter. The highlight for me was the Matariki Awards and Culture Week at the end of the term. It was a really great way to celebrate and demonstrate our 2019 theme of Kotahitanga.

Special thanks to our Property team who have been working hard over the holidays on our library refurbishment and many other jobs to get the College ready for another term. The College is looking fantastic!

Term 3 Staffing Changes

We welcome Aaron Corn to our Year 7 and 8 team while Jen Carter is on maternity leave and Linda Hammonds has been appointed Year 7 and 8 Co-Head of Faculty to work with Lindsay Gowans for this period of time. Phillippa Sherry is joining us as Drama teacher and Lloyd Smith is with us until week 6, covering Anja Angell-Donaldson's maternity leave.

We also welcome Philip Watson to our Property team. Philip is a plumber and gas fitter and will complement our existing team and their awesome skill set.

Work Day

This year we reintroduced Work Day. Thank you to all those students who contributed to the experience. The College raised $10,500. The Work Day experience is used to develop a culture of giving back by students, as well as to raise funds for facilities needed and used by our community, but not necessarily funded by the Ministry of Education (MOE). The experience also helps students strive to achieve the key competencies of the New Zealand Curriculum such as Participating and Contributing, Relating to Others and Managing Self, in addition to promoting good citizenship and nurturing the spirit of generosity. These characteristics form the foundations of good communities. Katikati College has had work days previously and many community members will remember them. They just have not been run recently.

As a community school we offer and provide a range of facilities for our community e.g. Action Centre, sports fields, hockey turf, etc. The cost of most of these far exceeds what the College is funded for by the MOE. Community organisations raised money to build these facilities, which is fantastic, however, the College is left to find the funds to maintain these facilities e.g lights, new floor, repairs etc. Just because we add a Hockey Turf or Action Centre to our College site does not mean we get the funding to maintain it. In addition, if we want to build a new facility e.g. an Innovative Horticulture Centre or Performing Arts Studio, it all comes out of the same sized money bucket and the bucket is never big enough to meet the ever-increasing expectations of our community. If we want to offer these facilities to our community, as well as offer high-quality teaching and learning, we need our community to help us raise sufficient funds.

I also strongly believe in the benefit to our students of feeling that they are contributing and that they have a responsibility to contribute helps us to grow the young people whom society needs to ensure that we have strong healthy future communities who will support each other to be ‘better than before’. Work Day will be an annual event on our College calendar.

Innovative Horticulture at Katikati College

Our Innovative Hort programme provides real opportunities for our learning community. We are now including crowdfunding, in addition to sponsorship, business donations and fundraising to raise the capital to build a profitable nursery, horticulture business and centre of excellence. This will provide our learners with 'real-life learning', prepare them for careers in horticulture and innovation, as well as generate profits that can be returned to our College to support teaching and learning, maintenance of community facilities (e.g. Action Centre & Hockey Turf), improving equipment and technology or subsidising College trips and events. 

Help us to become Horticulture and Innovation Education Leaders in New Zealand and beyond.

https://givealittle.co.nz/cause/innovative-horticulture-is-the-future

ERO Review

The ERO (Education Review Office) completed a review of the College last term. Overall, we received positive feedback with a few areas identified to work on. We will provide more specific feedback once the draft report has been made available.

School Uniform

Last term we are completed our uniform review, which has been led by our Deputy Principal, Mr Simon Finnimore and our Uniform Committee. The final decisions for the future Katikati College uniform have been made and we will share this at our Open Evening and in our next newsletter. The transition plan for the new uniform is:

• 2020 Year 7 and 11 in new uniform, any other students wanting a new uniform

• 2021 Year 7, 8, 11, 12, any other students wanting a new uniform

• 2022 All students in new uniform

When students need new uniform items they will be able to buy them and wear a combination of new and old uniform in 2020. There will be a uniform shop on site.   This will be a cost-effective way that ensures no families are financially penalised for the change.

Community Suggestions

There is a ‘Community Suggestion Box’ available on our Website for our school community to have their say and communicate their ideas and feedback to the College. These comments will be addressed each month through the Principal’s Comment of each newsletter.

Recent suggestions or queries made by the community have included:

• Multiple concerns raised about parents dropping students off in the College car park.

• Suggestions about possible changes to our bus routes

• Many suggestions about school uniform

• Request for better air conditioning and upgrades to classrooms

• A need to improve our website and social media

• Comments about the use of digital devices to support learning and queries to remove their use from some learning areas.

Many of the suggestions are directly linked to improving resourcing and upgrading our facilities. We have been fortunate this year to have our decile rating change from 6 to 5, which brings with it a small (about $40,000) increase in funding, however, we are consistently challenged to make our funding go as far as it needs to. This is the reason for initiatives like our Innovative Hort Business Plan and Work Day.

Please use the formal complaints process if you have any issues you would like formally investigated. This includes submitting in writing a description of your concerns to the principal. Details of this process are on the school website.

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 a flow chart to show where Learning Queries should be directed is available at https://goo.gl/K3mvWR.

In addition, 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 https://goo.gl/fMvD9L , for our whānau / parents with students in our Whānau Pūmanawa class more information is available using this link https://goo.gl/o8HGEj and our AIGA and Pasifika students should use this link https://goo.gl/hKTkLY .

All suggestions about uniform have be considered as part of the decision making process and we have implemented a number of strategies to improve safety in our College car park.

Board of Trustee Meetings for 2019

Our Board of Trustees represents the community and oversees the governance of the College. They meet twice a term on the dates shown in bold below. If you have any issues or ideas you wish to have considered at our BOT meetings please ensure they are sent to amacdonald@katikaticollege.school.nz by the deadline dates shown below.

Thursday 20 August at 4pm, deadline for correspondence Tuesday 15 August

Thursday 24 September at 4pm, deadline for correspondence Tuesday 19 September

Thursday 29 October at 4pm, deadline for correspondence Tuesday 24 October

Thursday 26 November at 4pm, deadline for correspondence Tuesday 21 November

We wish you all the best for Term 3. May it be filled with lots of laughter, adventure and learning!

Carolyn Pentecost

Principal/ Tumuaki

Katikati College