Amasio Jutel's end of year Senior Prizegiving speech is published below:

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has ever been a part of my high school life. That’s teachers, friends, family, and everyone else involved behind the scenes. All of the mums standing out in the cold on a mid-winter Wednesday afternoon to watch their kids playing footy. We are all so lucky to have you, it’s these people that make high school the experience it is.

Thanks to all of those who rarely get the recognition they should for shaping the character of the people I see in front of me. I do have a few personal thanks to give out, but I’ll save that for the end.

Last year, when I was sitting out where the rest of you are sitting now, at the moment when I was named Head Boy, I was really really excited. But that was before it hit me that in one year's time I’d have to do this speech I’d seen so many head prefects do before. So I hope you’ll forgive me for my soppy words.

This year was my fourth at Logan Park. I started my high school life at Jai Narayan College in Fiji, an experience which really helped put into perspective how amazing I have found my time at this school. The major thing I’ve found is I have friends in every year group, people I’m going to miss seeing every day. Coming into the Whanau room on a champions league morning, and having multiple ‘legal’ streams of the best games playing with 20+ juniors and seniors gathered round the computer like a cozy fire on a winter day. The lunchtime conversations I have with my uniform wearing friends are fairly unforgettable, for reasons I can’t disclose. It’s experiences like these that made high school so great.

To all of my fellow Year 13s, thank you guys. I’m gonna miss . . . most of you. I’ll be seeing some of you at uni next year, and Dunedin is a small city, so I’ll catch up with most of you at one point or another.

Advice to everyone else. Understand procrastination. Don’t deny that you are going to procrastinate. If you need that time to take care of yourself, do that. You are your first priority. Go as much as you can at your own pace. Get the sleep and rest you need. Accept it and turn it into something productive. At some point every one of you will procrastinate to the point where you’ll feel anxious, and that’s okay. I’ve felt this many times before. But find your good friends, talk to them, relieve that stress. Do what helps you, but don’t avoid doing what you need to do. Each and every one of you sitting in front of me is a different person, and we all deal with things differently. But make sure in the tangled mess that you may find to be high school, you look after yourself.

I do have a few thanks to give out. Firstly, an academic thanks, to all of my teachers. Genuinely just wonderful people that at least let on that they enjoy teaching my year. I want to thank them for putting up with me and helping me grow as a person. Thank you teachers.

Special shoutout to Ms Robins by the way, my group teacher for all my years at Logan Park. Thank you Ms Robins.

Also to the boys. Phil, Matt, Harry, Ben, Marcus, and Connor. Good lads, the lot of them.

My biggest thanks does have to go to Mr Govan, probably my mentor for all of my years here. It’s been a great 3 years of Football and Futsal. At the end of Year 10, Mr Govan invited me and my other junior mates to train for Futsal nationals. This year, we had trained for months and months, inside and outside of school. Of course we were heartbroken when nationals were cancelled, but I found that it was becoming less and less about the futsal, and more about the people.

I think my point here about Mr Govan was that in this time, he stopped being my teacher, and became my friend. I think that this is the most positive thing I’m going to take out of high school, so I would like to thank Gov for all of the experiences, all of the memories, all of the futsal trainings and games, all of the dry jokes that take just that wee bit too long to understand, and all of the successes we shared as a team. Thank you Mr Govan.

And thank you everyone at Logan Park.