Kia ora koutou te whanau. You will have been waiting for the announcement from the Government this afternoon, as we have, and you will now know that New Zealand will move into Alert Level 3 from midnight on Monday 27 April.

The earliest possible date for opening school, in a very restricted way to meet the requirements of Alert Level 3, is Wednesday 29 April. There is a great deal of planning required before we can open. We have started to prepare for this from tonight. We will confirm our actual opening date by the end of this week or as soon as we are able to.

The key message for you is that if you can, you should keep your child at home. You should only physically send your child to school if you need to. If your child has a health condition that means they are at a greater risk of a severe illness you must keep them at home.

In order to ensure the safety of those children, and our staff who do come to school, we will be operating with strict enforcement of health and safety measures. Any child who is sick must stay at home.

We have been pleased with the feedback on our remote learning programmes and see children engaging well. We know that there will have been any number of challenges for you to deal with, so thank you for your support. When school re-opens the remote learning programme will be used for both children at home and those on site at school. We will continue to be supporting learning at home. At school, our programmes will look very different to the usual school day.

This is what we expect to put in place:

• the total number of children attending school will determine how the children are grouped into bubbles

• children will be grouped into bubbles of no more than 10 including a teacher who will be responsible for supervising them

• children working in their bubbles may not necessarily be working with their usual class teacher

• children may not be grouped with their friends

• we will be considering having children from the same family grouped into the same bubble ( if numbers allow)

• staggered start and end of day, along with staggered break times, will be part of our planning for reopening

We will contact you later this week to find out whether you can keep your child learning from home, or need your child to attend in person. This information is very important to our planning so please help us by responding promptly. We will need your response to enable us to finalise an opening date.

The Ministry of Education has advised that they are working closely with the Ministry of Health to develop clear guidance that will support schools to safely re-open their premises to students and staff. This will help us work through the public health requirements that we all need to meet. As you will be doing, we want to be sure that what we do will keep our community as safe as possible.

We will continue to support your child’s learning with our remote learning programme while we progress our planning for Alert Level 3. Our planning will reflect the needs of the students who we know will be attending school as well as those who will continue to learn from home. We will be in touch again soon with more information. As you have been doing, please keep connecting with your teachers with any questions you might have.

COVID-19 Government Website The government website contains all the latest information about moving to Alert Level 3.

In the meantime, remember we are still in Alert Level 4. Stay safe and in your bubble

Nga mihi nui

Sue Elley

Tumuaki - Principal