Kia ora everyone,

Welcome to the new school year! Our first few days have been filled with positivity, curiosity, and a sense of community. The students have, after a couple of days, settled back into the routine of school. All of our staff have worked exceedingly hard to support the transitions of new students to school and of other students transitioning between classes and sites. I thank all of those staff for their work. 

This year is going to be one of the biggest years in the history of Sara Cohen School. 2025 will see us move into the new school at the start of term 2 (hopefully), the opening of the satellite, Ruatipua, at Otago Polytechnic and the expansion of our roll.

We welcome many new students to our school across all of our classes. A warm Sara Cohen welcome to our new students: Carlos, Tommy, Kaci, Elijah, Shadid, Connor, Kaylee, Caleb, Charlie, Jesse, Justin and Tyler. Also, a warm welcome to our new support staff: Darius, Rique, Boston and Keli and to our new teachers; Caitlin and Marianne. We welcome you and your families to our school community. We are sure that you will all enjoy your time at Sara Cohen School. 

At the start of this year we opened our new tertiary satellite at Otago Polytechnic (OP). This partnership with OP has been 4 years in the making. The new class was gifted the name Te toko a Ruatipua (The name of Paia’s pole that helped to separate Ranginui and Papatūānuku). At Ruatipua we currently have 6 students and three staff. There is the capacity to grow this class to around 16 students. This is very exciting for us and we look forward to the possibilities and opportunities that being located at the Polytechnic can bring for our students. Our students are not doing Polytech courses and their learning programmes are created by our staff.

We have been given the opportunity to grow our roll this year. The Ministry of Education (MOE) has committed to expanding parental choice for specialist places for their children. This means that once we move to the new school at Riselaw Road, we will be able to keep our base site and therefore be able to offer more places. This is very exciting and will bring Dunedin into line with the provision that most urban centres across the country enjoy. This is a direct result of central government policy changes about specialist education, which was partly informed by the National ERO Report on Day Specialist Schools; lobbying of government by the Special Education Principals Association of NZ (SEPAnz) and parental pressure.

https://evidence.ero.govt.nz/documents/built-in-not-bolted-on-evaluation-of-education-at-specialist-day-schools

Thank you all for attending our term 1 Collaborative Learning Plan meetings. These meetings are an essential opportunity for us to capture the voice of parents and students in the development of your child's learning programmes. It is also a chance to update medical information and to establish and reinforce home school partnerships. This information will now be used in meetings with teachers and therapists to form goals that are specific to the learning of your child. These goals will be shared with you and reported on in Seesaw. A huge thank you to our teaching and therapy staff for your work in these CLP meetings. 

Throughout the year we have evenings that bring our school community together. Some of these are information evenings, cultural events and celebrations. All of these events are social opportunities to connect the families of our school community together. We have our school community picnic next Wednesday the 26th of February from 5pm to 7pm at Base (44 Rutherford Street). Please come along and support this event and meet our other families.

Our new school build is progressing well and we are on target to move some of our classes into it at the start of term 2. I hope that this deadline is achievable, we are prepared if this is not the case. At the latest the move will be in term 2. The building looks amazing and will be a ‘State of the Art’ facility that we can all be proud of. A huge amount of dirt was moved to provide a stable platform for our school to be built on. This was moved to the bottom field, raising it by 2-3 metres. This has been leveled out and now looks fantastic. This will be an amazing asset to our school.

I hope that you all have a lovely weekend 

Ka kite anō

Matt