Tena koutou katoa. What an exciting week! To see our students come back in the gates each morning has been really lovely. These young people are the heart of our school, and their happy voices bring it alive. I’m so glad we can be back, even with half classes, for these last few weeks. Can I remind families that if someone in your home is unwell, it is best you keep your child home too.

To those not returning, the teachers will be putting your child’s items from their tote trays etc into a paper bag for you to collect. We will let you know when to collect these as we need to wait for the yearbooks to arrive so they, and production t shirts for Years 4-6, can go in too.

As the teachers have not had the children in class for most of these last two terms, they are not able to write the usual end of year report. We feel it is important to talk with you about your child’s learning though, so we are going to have parent-teacher meetings (via zoom) on Friday 3 December. A link to booking slots will come home soon. On this day, there will also be an opportunity to have a zoom meeting with the specialist teachers of Music, PE, STEM and ESOL. You will be sent a link for the zoom call, and when you go onto the call, you will be put in a waiting room until your allocated time. Once the 10 minutes have finished, the call will end so the teachers can talk with the next family. While it’s not ideal to have these via zoom, we feel it is better than not having them at all.

I also want to acknowledge all the students who took the time to enter Milford's Got Talent, online edition!! The high calibre and range of entries were really amazing. A big thank you also to Eugenie Middleton, Paula Snowball and Bev Boyd for organising and judging this. We certainly do have new ways of doing!!

Lastly, it is with much sadness that I let our Milford School community know of the passing of one of our parents. Pete Waters lost his battle overnight, and I know many of you helped in the fundraising for his treatment. We are thinking of this lovely family at this time, and send our love and aroha to them all. Please keep them in your thoughts.

Tale care and look after each other.

Ngā mihi nui

Sue