What a spectacular community event the Mud Run was! Smiles all round.

It was awesome to see the whole school out supporting the event with their whanau. Huge credit and acknowledgment goes to Sarah Ostergaard and Rebecca Newman who put hours and hours into making this event happen. It gave the whole community the chance to come together and do some fun family exercises together. 

The wonderful news is that Sarah and Rebecca are willing to do this again next year. They couldn’t have done this without the team of people who rallied and did so much to contribute to it’s success, from getting sponsors, to selling raffle tickets, parent help, bakers and more... There are too many to name. I also want to acknowledge the staff, the board and their whanau who came out to help and had fun participating also.

Mr Boniface, Miss Lee, and I had the honour of judging the speech competition. Wow - they were amazing! Speaking takes a lot of courage, to be able to stand up in front of a few hundred people, which included their peers, deserves recognition. The speeches were all to a very high standard and were impressive considering that they were written without home help. The speeches were well constructed and the delivery of every speech was to a very high standard. We heard speeches about why they should rule the world, be the mayor of Devonport, get a bag of lollies each day, AI, the Hyperloop, David Bowie, the trouble with homework, and more. 

Congratulations to Charlie B who won the speech competition talking about why there should be no homework and to Maddie J who came second: showing how similar schools are to prisons. They both represented our school at the interschool speech competition and made our school proud.

This week I have been thoroughly enjoying being at the New Zealand Principal Federation Conference connecting with other principals and learning about the direction and learnings of Aotearoa education. One of the key themes has been about equity in our country and kura to improve achievement. One speaker was an expert from Finland which has been a top performing country in Education in the OECD reports. 

Look out for our key dates Term 4 in this newsletter such as our Teacher Only Day on Friday 24th November.

Kind regards,

Emma Tolmie

Tumuaki/Principal of Stanley Bay School.