Hello to everyone in the Merrin School Community.

My name is Mirjam and I’m a long time member of the Merrin School Board. I’m happy to submit the first board of trustees newsletter of 2019.

On Monday we had our first board meeting for the year. It was lovely to see all our members after the summer break looking well rested and ready to tackle the year.

Our first order of business was to elect a board Chair and Deputy. I’m happy to report that our current chairman Brendan Anstiss has agreed to stay on as Board Chair. He did a fantastic job last year and it’s great to have him continue in this role. I will be filling the role of his Deputy for another year.

There were two main items on our agenda for this meeting, namely the school rebuild and our upcoming visit from ERO (the Education Review Office).

Those of you who regularly read the board reports will have noticed that the subject of our school rebuild comes up a lot. This has been an ongoing process for the last few years, and although progress is slow, we are steadily moving toward a start date.
Lisa and the board have had a lot of meetings in recent months with planners, architects and people from the Ministry of Education (MOE). The big challenge has been finding the middle ground between a great school design, fit for purpose to be within the budget that the MOE is prepared to allocate. As you can imagine there have been some robust discussions about this and although both sides have had to compromise at times, we are optimistic that we are close to reaching an agreement that will provide Merrin School with a very good rebuild. So let’s just say: We’ll keep you posted.

The other big item on our agenda is Merrin School’s visit from the ERO (Education Review Office). ERO is an organisation that visits all schools in the country every three years. It’s our turn in April.
EROs role, in a nutshell, is to provide feedback via an in-depth, onsite self-review process. 

At our last ERO visit we received a glowing report, and we are very confident we will do so again this year. We all know Merrin School is a wonderful community of dedicated teachers and support staff with awesome learning programme’s for our students. This is our opportunity to show ERO our latest innovations. ERO will be moving around our school in early April and will watch the school in action.  The boards' performance will also be assessed, and we are hopeful that we will pass muster.

Other board business was the passing of the 2019 budget. As per usual our school finances are in great shape.

Our next Board meeting is in March. In the meantime I hope we will continue to have more of this fantastic summer weather.