Talofa lava, Malo e leilei, Kia orana, and warm Kavanagh greetings

We are back in action! After many weeks of planning and preparation, it is wonderful to have all our young people back with us. Yesterday was a great start to the year with a calm, settled, happy and very well organised day for our new students from year 7-13. We begin this year with an increased roll and we hope that our new students and whānau quickly feel part of our Kavanagh family.

Staff have been working to plan for various scenarios for this term which, unfortunately, looks likely to be disrupted again. The landscape is not clear, and I will be doing my best to communicate about changes, new procedures and alterations to programmes as needed, without bombarding you with emails too frequently!

As outlined in recent communications, we start the year with a few systems changes. One that we would appreciate your support with is the timetable changes that require all our students to be in class ready for learning by 8.50am, with devices charged. Our old ‘tutor time’ to start the day has moved to 9.45am three days a week for half an hour to give more focussed pastoral time that will support social and relationship skills development. To reflect the change in the role of the tutor teacher, they are now being called Kaiārahi symbolising their mentoring and caring responsibility.

We look forward to presenting our prefect badges tomorrow, and the livestream link can be found in this newsletter. Because we can’t celebrate our Opening Mass like usual due to limits on numbers, we will instead have year level Masses occurring during the next few weeks.

We have welcomed eight new staff into Kavanagh this year. Enjoy reading a little about each of them during the next few newsletters, and let’s hope it is not too long before you can meet them in person.

As always, any concerns, worries, or conversations about your child’s life at school, are welcome. The home-school partnership is key to success and we look forward to working closely with you in 2022.

As we enter a term of covid challenges, a colleague reminded me this week of some words by Mother Teresa – “One step at a time is all it takes to get you there.”

Mā te atua e manaaki – God Bless