As I sit here, the thermometer has hit 32 degrees celsius. What an amazing start to summer! The next week is full of events and celebrations… so read carefully this week so you don’t miss anything. In this article you will find information on Class Placements for 2018, the new Team Structure and the teachers within them, and a quick update about the new format of the End of Year Celebration (Whakanui).

Kia ora

As we fast approach the end of the year, we are deep into planning for 2018. The main part here is the school structure and staffing. This has been completed. Below you will find the details.

You will see we have two new teachers arriving. We are pleased to announce we appointed Lisa Dowell (ex-Thorrington Associate Principal) as Team Leader for Team Rock Solid and Tony Roberts (an ex-pupil and local resident) to the Team @ the Top team. We are excited to welcome them to our community and are sure you will make them feel welcome.

We do have a few farewells to make. We farewell Kellen Gillstrom who has secured a position at Marshlands Primary School. We thank him for his two years at MPS and wish him all the best for his career. We also say goodbye to Liz Conly. Liz has worked in Learning Support over the last 14 years at MPS and has been the cornerstone to helping students with learning disorders maintain positive well-being and to accelerate their progress. She will be greatly missed. We also farewell Euan Heffer who has been our caretaker over the past 18-months. We thank him for the work he has done to keep MPS a safe environment for our students.

Once our staffing is finalised, we move on to complete the class placements. As you will be aware, we sought parental feedback in Term 3 and also asked students to contribute to this process. Then we meet as teachers to place each child in their 2018 class. As you can imagine, this is not an easy process. Nor is it one we take lightly. In the end, we end up with classes that hopefully are balanced with the wide variety of social, emotional, physical and academic needs. While we work incredibly hard to ensure all needs are met, this is not always possible. In the advent of your child responding adversely to their placement, we highly recommend that parents remain upbeat and positive about the placement decision. Quite often, in a couple of days things settle down and once they have been to meet their 2018 teacher (this will happen on Thursday morning) they settle and feel more comfortable. The big part of this is that grit and determination are two attributes our children really need to develop as they move through their schooling and coping with class placements is one of the events they will have less input to as the years go by. Class placements go out with our end-of-year reports on Wednesday 13th December. We recommend you have your child bring these home before opening them.

Finally, you will be aware that we have changed the format of our end-of-year celebration (Whakanui). The biggest change being the venue. I went to visit the Christchurch Boys High School hall yesterday and it is an amazing venue. It will be cool, and windless…. that I can guarantee. The biggest challenge you will all have is parking. I would highly recommend arriving early as parking is at a premium. There is plenty of parking on the surrounding streets but you may have to walk some distance. We really look forward to this day and we hope you can attend… we even have a couple of surprises up our sleeves.

We will have a final newsletter at the end of next week, but I will take this opportunity to thank all our community for their ongoing support and commitment to MPS. On behalf of our entire staff I say thank you. We hope you all have eventful and enjoyable holidays and look forward to seeing you back in 2018.

Kia pai tō rā

Chris Nord