He mihi mahana ki a koutou katoa - Warm greetings to all.

Welcome  back to the home of the SMART Somerfield Kid. I hope you and your whānau managed to catch some lovely summer weather before we were moved to the Red setting of the Covid Protection Framework (CPF) - commonly known as Traffic Light.

Every year we have a theme that guides our work and this year it is

Past, Present and the Future. Celebrating Somerfield Te Kura Wairepo Diversity.

We have a great year planned for our SMART Somerfield Kids under this theme and shortly you will see our other goals when we publish our Community Report in the next few weeks.

Welcome back to all our staff. A special welcome to our new DP/SENCO  Nicky Horne and our other new staff member, Meagan McKinney. Meagan is teaching Year 5 in Space 3. Welcome back to Karen Haines, who is ropu leader of Waka Mōkihi and teaching Year 2 in Space 7. Also welcome back to Kim Radcliffe Price from completing her studies. Kim is also teaching Year 2 and is in Space 5.

We have a number of new children starting today, 21 New Entrants and quite a few who have moved from overseas and various parts of the country. I have assured them that we have a great community and they will get a warm Somerfield welcome.

There is a lot of information about COVID and from now we will put updates in a separate article.

I'll send regular updates through the APP and email, but if you miss these the newsletter and the website will keep you informed. As you can imagine our focus is to get our tamariki back to school, settled and learning. We are extremely proud of the way they came into school today showing great independence and the Year 4-6's are very responsible with their masks. Definitely SMART Somerfield Kids.

We don't know how omicron is going to affect us but we have a number of contingencies. We will keep you posted if and when we need these.

In the event that we may have to go online for learning we will be surveying you next week about devices. Please watch out for this.

Attendance

Each year I have a focus on attendance. It is very important your child attends school. If they are at school we can teach them and they learn. There is a huge amount of research on this topic. Your job is to keep us informed. The worst thing in the world is losing a child. You MUST contact us by 8:30am and tell us if your child is not attending that day. It can take a long time to track down children if we haven't been informed.

If you have difficulty getting your child to school talk to the class teacher in the first instance. They will inform Nicky or myself if a solution cannot be found.

Use the APP or text giving the child's name, space and reason. If they are having a COVID test let us know then let us know the results of the test. Reasons are a requirement. The MoE collects attendance data each term.

If you have any concerns during the year please contact the classroom teacher in the first instance. This process works in most instances. They will seek guidance and support from the leadership team if solutions cannot be found.

Please check out our policies if you are unsure about processes. There is a link on our website.

We are looking forward to a positive term and will endeavor to ensure you know what is happening inside the school gates. Please help us by respecting the need of the school to protect tamariki and staff.