RJHS Newsletter - Term 4, Issue 2

KORERO FROM FRASER

Welcome to Week 4 everyone.

We are looking forward to seeing many of you next week at our end of year Iwi prize giving events. This is an opportunity to celebrate and acknowledge many of our young people who have displayed our CLOAK dispositions in many different contexts over the course of this year. We love these evenings and look forward to sharing them with you all.

Last week we spent some time as a staff reviewing our existing learning programmes during our teacher only day and also collected voice from you, our community and students. Following this, we have spent some time synthesising all of the feedback we received to inform our planning and preparation for next year. While this process is ongoing it is clear that there is a need to make some changes to our existing timetable structure, particularly in the time given to Tautoro versus integrated modules. There was also feedback regarding the need to make better use of the Ahurea blocks of time in the morning between 9 and 9.30am.

In the next eNews I will share more detailed plans about what our timetable structure for 2021 will look like. We really appreciate the feedback from all who took the time to do this and want to reassure you all that we are listening and looking to further improve what we are doing.

Last week I also received some very significant and positive news from the Ministry of Education (MOE) regarding our staffing allocation. The MOE have allocated us close to ten additional teachers for 2021 even though our roll will be quite similar to this year (maybe 20 more students than we finish the year with). This funding will have a significant positive impact on learning and the ability for us to staff our timetable adequately. This has always been challenging for us and previously the BOT has funded additional teaching teachers from our own school funds stretching our budget. We are close to employing all staff to fill these additional teacher positions.

This additional staffing is a great start for us ahead of the 2021 school year with the additional modular learning spaces also due to be on site and usable at some stage in term 2.