Week 8

UPCOMING DANCES

As many of you will be aware the Dance Season is nearly upon us. This is a time of year eagerly anticipated by our senior students and we hope that these evenings are enjoyable for all. In order to ensure that the evenings do run smoothly for all those attending, we would ask that all students and parents carefully read the procedures and protocols that have now been sent out. Thanks to the many people, including the students themselves, who have put a lot of time and effort into the preparation for these events and we look forward to them being great evenings.

Year 11 Semi-Formal
The Year 11 Semi-Formal will be held on Saturday 15 June at Hagley Oval from 7.30pm - 10.30pm.

Senior Dance
The Senior Dance will be held on Saturday 29 June in the Atrium at the Tannery. Year 13 arrive from 8pm and Year 12 from8.30pm and the dance concludes at midnight.

Dances at Other Schools

We organise school dances for Years 12&13, Year 11 and Year 9 and we also support certain other schools’ junior dances by having a Rangi Ruru presence there. In this case permission, contact and transport details are requested from parents. In all other cases, girls attend dances as an individual and responsibility for care remains solely with parents and caregivers. Please be aware that girls with co-curricular commitments must be available for these activities as they take precedence.

LEAVERS BALL 2019

The Rangi Ruru Old Girls’ Association (RROGA) Leavers’ Ball will be held this year on Thursday 5 December. All details will be sent to you in Term 4 but parents of Year 13 girls need to get this into their diaries!

STUDENT CARE & DEVELOPMENT

As many of you will be aware, we have a schoolwide focus on wellbeing and connecting with positive relationships. Alongside this we do not use phones during class time unless it is being used for supervised learning purposes. However, we have noticed that at the Year 7 and 8 level many students have not been able to follow our protocols and have been defaulting to communicating through their phones. Research tells us that this is neither healthy for their own wellbeing or that of their peers. In order to manage this we have decided to implement a new phone policy for Year 7 and 8 students as a trial until the end of this term. Students are being discouraged from bringing their phones to school, but those who do bring them for transport and safety reasons will need to sign them in to their tutor for the day.

This policy has only been in place for a short time, but Year 7 and 8 teachers have already noticed that students are communicating with each other in a more positive way. Many of the students themselves are in support of the policy and are reflecting on their phone use outside of school.

Students have had information sessions about the Harmful Digital Communications Act so that they fully understand the law and what it means. We suggest that parents help their children to manage their devices by removing them at bedtime, monitoring their use through random checks, assisting with privacy settings on all sites and apps being used as well as finding a service app to control access.

The following link from Netsafe also has some wonderful advice for parents on this topic: https://www.netsafe.org.nz/the-kit/resource-centre/