Kia ora,

We hope you enjoy this first edition of Intouch for 2024. For new parents, Intouch is our fortnightly newsletter delivered on Friday afternoon, and contains a lot of the important information you need to know about what’s going on at Rangi Ruru, as well as news, results and achievements from our wonderful ākonga.

I hope you have all had a fantastic summer break, and enjoyed some quality family time. Our Board Chair Nicki Carter, Juliet Collins and I have this week travelled to Brisbane to attend the commissioning of Dr Sandra Hastie at Somerville House. She is enjoying her new role, although the heat in Brisbane is taking some adjusting to!

Our school theme for the year is ‘Embrace the Change’, fitting for obvious reasons, but also a theme we feel is especially pertinent to our learners; as Nelson Mandela said “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world”.

This year we welcome the following new staff to our kura: Amy Bruce (RA Residential Assistant), Taryn Cooper (Events & Venue Coordinator), Savannah Laws (Sports Coordinator – Netball), Coline Marion (French Language Assistant), Sophia Loreto (Spanish Language Assistant arrives in April), Amelia Vernon-Stroud (GAP Student joining Rachel & Amelia).

New teaching staff include Alice Drummond (Science, Biology), Dongni Gao (Accounting, Business Awareness), Simone Hamilton (Head of Economics, Business Awareness, Social Studies), Jemma Cattell (English), Erin Swarbrick (Maths), Julie Watkins (Maths), Phoebe Wright (Part-time ESOL).

Julia Newman (PE & Health) is also returning after maternity leave, and Lucy Winsloe (PE & Health) will be returning in Term 3.

Hilary Stubbs is on leave for the year, and we also wish Linda Robinson all the best in her new full-time ESOL role at Burnside High School.

We’ve had a few internal changes or additions to roles, including: Juliet Collins (Deputy Principal, Curriculum), Amy Martin-Bowen (Assistant Principal, Care and Development), Janette Frier (Assistant Principal, Systems, Operations, Co-curricular), Owen Flattery (Head of Digital Transformation & Innovation), Leigh Allan (Year 9 Dean), Jon Kimber (Leader of Learning), Mark Cotham (Head of English), Kistina Wu (Head of Technology), Courtney Katene (Head of Te Ara) and Hayley Knight (Head of Social Science & Commerce).

One of the highlights of my term break was looking over our NCEA results, including the new co-requisite results. They were simply outstanding. Literacy and Numeracy corequisites were completed by Year 10 in October. These are our outcomes: Numeracy 88%, Writing 89% and Reading 94%. Rangi Ruru has made a significant investment in ensuring that our teaching and learning offers students every opportunity to succeed, and each student makes a significant commitment via the hours of dedication and hard work they put in. Congratulations to all of our students on these results.

Ngā mihi

Stephanie Barnett
Acting Principal