Our Tū Kōkiri students have enjoyed visits from a range of organisations in 2022.

In our Deaf Lives sessions, Deaf adults from New Zealand and overseas have inspired and motivated students with valuable life lessons and role modelling. A highlight for students was the recent presentation from Herbert Klein, a Deaf Mental Health specialist from the UK. Herbert's visual explanations of Mental Health issues were accessible and interesting.

Auckland Disability Law has made regular presentations to Tū Kōkiri students covering essential topics such as Consumer Rights, Employment Rights, Disability Rights and Discrimination, Cyber Safety, Dealing with Police, and Reasonable Accommodations at work.

InsideOUT - Creating Social Change 

In Term 3, the rainbow community organisation InsideOUT came to Tū Kōkiri to talk to us about supporting rainbow youth in Aotearoa and how we could make a change. After the talk, our students were inspired and wanted to lobby our management team for a more gender inclusive school.

An area of focus for our students was the need for gender-inclusive bathrooms. They wanted to see the bathrooms made gender neutral, including the accessible bathrooms, and they also wanted sanitary bins in all cubicles.

Nicola, Aj and Tai emailed our Executive Team requesting these changes. They received a swift reply, inviting them to present their idea to the managers kanohi-ki-te-kanohi.

The requested changes were agreed to and our students are happy to report that there will be new, gender-neutral signs for the bathrooms and sanitary bins in all cubicles. That's a big win for everyone!

Thank you to those students for creating social change!

Licenced to learn to drive!

Another success for Tū Kōkiri students in 2022 is achieving a Driver Licence. Chris Sinclair has been working hard on choosing and developing a training programme which was suitable for delivery in NZSL. It was very rewarding delivering this to a very motivated group of students who were were engaged, motivated and willing to learn.

As a result, a number of students successfully passed their Learner Licence tests! Congratulations to Johnathan, Rahui, Brooklyn, Mohi, Wiremu, Aj, Kaylee, and Courtney. We look forward to them learning how to drive while we keep teaching more students to get their Learner Licences in 2023.