Kia ora! During the week, we had a great visit from some of the Westlake Boys High School students who came as part of the Westlake Boys Languages Council. Some of the boys have been coming to visit us for the last 2 or 3 years, and really love their connections here.

We are the only school WBHS have consistently visited with this initiative over this time, and our students really enjoy working alongside these older students. As WBHS is the pathway for most of our boys, interactions like this help ease transition concerns.

Our school mediators have run a very successful peace week, raising awareness of actions we can all take to help create a more peaceful world. This group are led by one of our teachers, Charlotte Barrance, and we thank her for the time she gives to this. The gold coin donations students brought in on the Mufti day meant that Kidsline received a wonderful donation of $578.20 this week. Thank you all!

Some of you will have heard in the media that a Lockdown Review was commissioned from KPMG, following the 15 March Christchurch attacks, with a report released a few days ago. I would like to reassure you that we have good procedures for both lockdown and evacuation, which have been put in place by an external company we use, Harrison Tew, who are an emergency planning specialist company. We are, however, now going through the key findings and recommendations in the report to see if there are any areas for improvement.

A reminder that there is still time for your children to be sponsored for the great Kiwi Quiz-a-thon. The idea is they askpeople (family members, grandparents etc) to sponsor them an amount of money for each question they get right. We will test them next Wednesday, and then they collect the money from their sponsors and bring it into school. The money raised is going towards the brand new senior playground that we hope to start building very soon.

Have a great weekend everyone.

Ngā mihi nui

Sue Cattell

Principal