Principal News

Two recent announcements have left me feeling optimistic that we are moving in the right direction in the Covid19 pandemic.  The reduction of isolation from 14 days to 10 and now down to 7 days, and this weekend the vaccine mandate for students doing school activities such as sport is being lifted.  

However we are only just entering the community spread stage and it is important that we continue to do the preventative measures that have kept us all safe so far.  I was talking to a colleague in Auckland this week, and in his school of 400, he had 90 students and a large number of staff off school due to Covid19.  It is commonly accepted that Auckland is a few weeks ahead of Dunedin in regards to the modelling so we should expect that we will have many disruptions at Tahuna over the next few weeks.  We are hopeful and confident that we will be able to keep the school operating throughout.

Our online learning programme has kicked in for students who are self isolating.  Thank you to all of the teachers for working so hard on their google classrooms.  This is the first port of call if your child is working from home.  On Friday we also held our first face to face online class and it was great to see so many children attend.  This is an open meeting for any students who are working from home.  It is a chance to connect with some other students, tell everyone what they have been doing and ask questions about any work they maybe stuck on.  This will be a regular meeting space at 10am each day and the link is on their google classroom.  

Our infection rate is very similar to last week with less than 10 students contracting Covid19 across the school.  School is still a very safe place to be.

We have a number of support staff doing great work quietly in the back ground.  This week I want to highlight the work of Jamie, our new sports co-ordinator.  He is doing an excellent job engaging children with activities to do at lunchtimes.  It has been wonderful to see so many children take this opportunity to play a game at lunchtime and more importantly to hear and see them having so much fun.  Jamie is currently organising a rugby league tournament at lunchtimes for the children to take part in.

Kind regards

Simon Clarke

Principal