A message from Rachel Skelton

What a last few weeks it has been for Rolleston College.

It has been fantastic to watch learners Develop Self through their return to learning routines sports and extracurricular activities. I have enjoyed getting to a number of games and events. It always feels that things are back to normal when there is a return to Friday night Basketball. It was also a privilege to be invited to view the Yr 12 Law and Crime class in their mock trial. It was superb to see the learners to be so invested in their roles during proceedings. It was also fantastic to be able to listen to the Yr 12 Solo music performances. Some of the learners I had not heard sing since their junior years and I was blown away by how much they had developed in confidence.

Another very proud moment was to see Bella Newcombe and her team of mainly Yr 11 learners develop and run our first Rolleston College Pride Day. I saw this as a wonderful celebration of being inclusive to all people and making sure we foster a culture of being proud of who you are, whoever you are. This event showed how important it is to Build Communities within our college. It was also particularly pleasing to see an event developed as a part of an Ako Quest project come to fruition. I am very excited to see how our “mega exhibition evening” at the end of term three will allow learners from all year levels to share their Quest projects and other learning from the year with our wider community. Watch out for advertisements through our facebook page and website.

It is also really pleasing to see our learners' transformation as they move through the school. We have a number of learners who do dual pathways and are spending time in their area of interest in the senior school at Ara and NZTA amongst other providers. This is an important step for our learners who are starting to transition out into trade related vocations. At the other end of the school it has been wonderful to hear the feedback from our Yr 8 visits where our amazing learners from our recent “school tour video” have had the chance to visit our local primary schools to talk about the fantastic opportunities to Transform Futures by enrolling at Rolleston College. Mrs Tippett has told me how thoroughly impressed she has been in the articulate way our learner ambassadors from Yrs 9-12 have been able to share what they love about their school and what they have learnt so far. A huge thanks to Mrs Tippett, Jackson, Hamish, Alyssa, Kayla, Evie, Gemma and Hunter on this great work.

With so much to be excited, happy and proud of it was a shame that this week we experienced an ICT issue that you or your child may have become aware of. To explain the issue a brief statement from our ICT provider:

A core piece of software, Filemaker, that is an integral piece of the school’s Student Management System (SMS), suffered an error. This error caused the data entry by teachers and support staff for 10 days to be written to temporary files rather than the database files themselves.

This error has caused significant disruption to the writing and delivery of reports for the school community.

Since identification of the issue, teachers have been committed to ensuring that student information is not only repopulated, but that reports will be available as soon as practical. Additionally, the school and Board of Trustees have been working with relevant partners and the MoE to understand the complete picture of this incident and mitigate any risk in the future. This has identified a need to alter some of our IT storage and will cause our school system to be down for a day in the future. Hopefully over a weekend, and we will give all learners plenty of notice as it will mean no access to their work for a day. Thank you for your understanding and support in these unique circumstances.

For this reason our reports will be sent out next week rather than today as we had hoped. If you do notice any issues with anything held on our school database, eg attendance, accounts, credits please do let us know so we can look into this issue and get it sorted.

As we move into the holidays we hope that learners and their families have time to have a really good rest and a break. We have had a fairly crazy few months both in New Zealand and in the World and as a school community we have coped with a huge amount of ever changing circumstances extremely well. We know that there are families in our community where there may be added financial and other pressures at this time. Please make sure that you reach out to us as a school for assistance if you need it.

Thank you to the learners, whanau and our fantastic staff for a wonderful but unusual term!

Take care. Be brave. Be kind. Stay safe.

Rachel Skelton

Principal