Kia ora koutou, welcome to Term 2!

Term 2 is a relatively quiet one as far as students are concerned with the Cross Country (postponed to this Monday 15 May) and Book Week (26-30 June) the biggest events of the term.  Here's hoping Monday's forecast remains fine and brings a better day for our Cross Country!

As a school, we have ERO due in mid-June, and on Friday 16 June we have our not-to-be-missed fundraiser - By Jingo ... it's BINGO!  Drinks at Winnie's this Tuesday night, 7:30pm for those that can make it, and would like to lend a hand to help make this event an awesome fundraiser.

As part of our annual planning and reporting cycle there are two significant documents the Board of Trustees uses to help guide its strategic direction. The first one is the Charter. This comprises of several different sections. It sets out the community priorities which are then developed in to Strategic Plan which covers three years. From this strategic document, an Annual Plan is developed which sets out the specific areas for development, and the actions required to achieve them over the course of the year. Included in the Annual Plan are specific student targets based around identified areas of need. These targets are identified through the analysis of the National Standards data which is formed using multiple sources of assessment information. The analysis of this data is reported in our second document Reporting Student Achievement 2017 (which reports on the 2016 school year).

While this all sounds complicated, the documents themselves are easy to read. If you would like to read either of these documents, we have copies of them available in the Office or on our school website here.

This term we have the Education Review Office visiting  from 12-15 June to carry out a review of Mt Pleasant School. The purpose of this review is about a participatory/collaborative approach to the evaluation process. This means that they will be looking at our internal evaluation capacity and will construct a report based on the evidence they see during this visit. The reviewers use the Evaluation Indicators (full document here) which are based around eight guiding principles that:

• focus on valued outcomes for diverse (all) students as articulated in The New Zealand Curriculum and Te Marautanga o Aotearoa
  
• focus on the school conditions that promote equity and excellence
• foreground the relationships required to enact the Treaty of Waitangi
  
• are underpinned by a research-based theory of improvement 
  
• reflect the interconnected nature of the organisational conditions that promote and sustain improvement and innovation
  
• describe what is observable or measurable
  
• signal the shift to an evaluation orientation that requires deep professional expertise and engagement.
  

The Board of Trustees welcomes the opportunity to share the developments the school has made since the last ERO Review. We are unsure of the agenda at this time, but will let you know more in upcoming newsletters. 

In our continued efforts to improve the safety of our community as they move to and from school, we met with representatives from the Christchurch City Council to discuss the challenges faced by families who walk to school from the Eastern side of the school. More specifically, those who negotiate the crossing of Mt Pleasant Road to walk up Billys Track. We walked down to this area to observe traffic behaviour, look at the current road configuration and to identify areas of concern. While there, we also talked with families as they traveled to school. Our general observation is that speed is still the single biggest risk to our students and families. This contributes to all the secondary risks like crossing centre lines and lessoning the time families have to cross the road safely. We are particularly keen to hear feedback about any other areas of concern so we can send this back to the CCC and include it in our Travel Safety Plan. In addition to this, we are also setting up a student group called the Road Safety Team. They will be working together to come up with initiatives based around making our community safer. Watch out for their articles in future newsletters. 

Finally, the postponement of our Cross-Country on Wednesday highlighted that a reminder was needed around our systems of communication. In the Housekeeping article of every newsletter, there is a communication article that outlines the strategies we use. Most of these allow for near instant communication to keep you informed. This is even more critical when events are being evaluated for health and safety as to whether or not they go ahead. If you are not receiving school communications, please call in to the Office and Carolyn will help you sort this out. 

Have a great two weeks... hei konei ra.