Kia ora everyone! 

Welcome back to Term 2! 

Today is a huge day for us with our Relay for Life event happening tonight. We have smashed our original $5000 target and at the time of writing this article we are sitting at $19630 with the hope of getting to $20000 before the end of the day. If you would like to donate, please click here to be taken to our Relay for Life webpage. 

This morning I attended a community leaders' breakfast hosted at the Knox Church. Two of our prefects, Georgia and Nadia, and I were part of a panel discussion addressing bridging the gaps between generations. It was a great discussion and we shared lots of ideas about how we could work together. 

My trip to China was an amazing experience. I travelled with a group of educators, mainly from Palmerston North, to cities in the Anhui and Jiangsu provinces of China. We had a wonderful trip and visited 14 schools in 5 different cities.  I signed 'sister school' agreements with 2 schools, one in Hefei and one in Wuxi, who are keen to send students to us. I was in awe of the sheer size of the place! The schools we visited had more than 4000 students in each of them. The facilities were outstanding and I've already started developing relationships with our sister schools. I'll share more information about my trip in a separate article as there are far too many photos to share here! 

As I was leaving for China, I received a letter from the Prime Minister congratulating our school on its fantastic NCEA results last year. I've attached the letter to this article. I can't say enough how incredibly proud this made me feel of our school, its students and staff. What an achievement! 

A couple of things to let you know about. We have both our open day and paid union meetings happening on Wednesday 15th May and Thursday 16th May in Week 3 respectively. The school will be closing early on both days; 12pm on Wednesday and 12:30pm on Thursday. It would be appreciated if bus students could be picked up on those days but any students who can't be picked up will be supervised at school. 

Have a great weekend,

Jo