For those who I have not yet met, my name is Morgan Walker and I am the Presiding Member of the the Oaklands Te Kura o Owaka Board. We intend to update you periodically through the year with updates from the Board.

It was great to see the first production in a number of years last term and the Board wanted to personally thank our Teachers, Staff, PTA & Parents involved for making this event happen - it meant a lot of long days and extra hours from you all to put on what was an incredible event so sincerely, thank you for your time and efforts. What an amazing experience for our children to be part of.

Late last year the Ministry of Education moved their funding model from the Decile System to 'The Equity Index’ which takes into consideration a number of factors rather than just parental wealth in determining funding for the school. This has meant Oaklands has gone from being a Decile 9 School to having an Equity Index of 406. This change has meant we have received a reduction in funding from the MoE ongoing.

It is therefore more important than ever to get our School Donations paid to support the education of our children as well as supporting extracurricular events like our School Camps, Sports Teams, Productions etc. You can pay this on your Kindo account or in the school office in person. We understand it is financially a challenging time for many families and every cent counts, so if you wanted to make a partial payment or setup a direct debit we can facilitate this in the office. We thank the majority of families who have paid. If you haven’t yet had a chance to pay, we’d greatly appreciate your support.The Board has recently signed off on the installation of a Bike Track around the perimeter of our field. This creates a full loop of the field with adventure jumps, slalom courses and a set of bikes for use at school. This also helps to resolve an ongoing issue we have with the Cobra Street entranceway flooding over winter. We have received significant funding from the Bikes in School program to support this. I’d like to acknowledge Margaret Trotter our Principal for her time and commitment to this project and for working hard to get funding to support this. At this time we expect this to be completed in the first half of next year, although dates are yet to be confirmed. A concept plan (not the final design though) is below so you can get an idea of the scope: