In this week's newsletter:

School life

• Year 6 Leadership Opportunities
• Board News
• Presiding Member (Board Chair)
• Communication
• Senior School Class Breakfast
• Middle School Class Breakfast - Tomorrow! 
• Junior School Breakfast update
  
• WSS Corner
• Westmere Winter Wonderland Disco, 30th June
• Scholastic Book Club fundraiser

Other Opportunities

• Western Springs College 2022 Open Week Tour
• Ponsonby Intermediate Open Day Tour

School life

Living with COVID is a challenge for us all, so thank you for your support in continuing to wear masks in school and providing them for your children in the Middle and Senior Schools. It is much less challenging with cooler weather.

We continue to monitor air quality, but the weather so far has allowed us to keep windows and doors open for large parts of the day. We are currently trialling an air purifier system from the Ministry of Education and monitoring CO2 levels. We can see that even having doors and windows open a small amount does help and that our ventilation breaks make a big difference. 

Forging ahead with school events in a COVID world feels great. It was lovely to catch up with whānau at the Junior School Breakfast last week. Don't forget;

• Middle School Breakfast - tomorrow morning - 8 am

• Senior School Breakfast- next week! Thurs 2nd June
  
  

Year 6 Leadership Opportunities

This year we have reworked our Year 6 leadership programme. All children have been invited to step into leadership roles. In these roles, they act as kaitiaki and kaiāwhina - guardians of our school values and culture.

Children are offered opportunities and the chance to regularly check in with an adult on their work. Many children have thrived in their new roles and are inspiring others to step up too.

Thanks to Holly, Georgia, Ruby, Harriet and Georgia for their work on organising a Westmere Pink Shirt Day. They will announce this to students in assembly tomorrow.

Board News

As a School Board, we do most of our work through a set of policies that Teresa and the team are responsible for implementing.

These policies are like the instruction manual for running our school and we regularly refer to them to guide our decision making. Like other schools, we keep them on the School Docs website, which parents and whānau are welcome to look at at any time.

This term, the School Board is taking a close look at our Healthcare policies as part of a regular review and would welcome your feedback.

To have your say, login to School Docs using ‘westmere’ as both the username and password, and select the tab ‘Under review’. You’ll see all the policies that we are currently reviewing.

To read a policy, click on its name. To give feedback, use the green speech bubble icon at the top right-hand side of the page. This will be sent to Teresa.

The Board will consider all feedback at our next Board meeting on Thursday 30th June.

Presiding Member (Board Chair)

The board chair is now officially known as the Presiding Member. At our last meeting, Tony McKee, formally stood down as our presiding member. The board are continuing to explore how a shared leadership structure would work and best support our school. 

Moving forward our new presiding member is Te Mete Lowman, but Te Mete will be working closely with Kim Archibald as Deputy Chair while we continue to work through some of the logistics. 

All of the board are committed to sharing the workload and supporting the leadership.

We will formally thank Tony for his work at the end of his term later in the year.

Communication

We are trialling different forms and levels of communication this year. If you have any feedback I would love to hear from you. You can leave your comments here. 

Senior School Breakfast

• Thursday 2nd of June @8.00am - 8.45am LS4 & LS6
• Where? In the covered area outside LS6
• Sign up here

Middle School Breakfast - Tomorrow at 8 am !!

Pop the date in your diary to join the children and teachers from LS7 and LS8 and their families for a Middle School Breakfast on Friday, May 27th.

BYO Coffee or Tea and please visit the sign-up link to let us know what you think you’ll bring to share.

Books! Books! Books!

Thank you very much to all the families who bought books from the Scholastic Book Club fundraiser we ran over the last couple of weeks. The order has been placed and we hope to receive and distribute the books early next week. Thanks to you, we have $790.00 to spend on new books for the library. Don't worry if you didn't participate this time. We will have our annual Book Fair week 2 next term, where the library is transformed into a book shop full of great reads and bargains. Many thanks again for the great support.

Junior School Breakfast update

Thanks to everyone who attended the Junior School breakfast. It was lovely to see everyone in person again and for the teachers to meet you all.

Westmere School Supporters (WSS) Corner

Well, we have kicked off 2022 with great representation from our Westmere families and caregivers, with 20 attendees at our first WSS meeting of the year. After such turbulent times over the past couple of years, and barely any social events at school, there was a wonderful sense of renewed excitement, to make this a truly special year for our tamariki. We have some exciting events planned already… so watch this space!

There will be another WSS meeting next Tuesday 31st May, 7 pm to 8:30 pm in the staffroom (wine, tea & coffee, and nibbles provided), so come along if you would like to get involved, or simply find out what it’s all about.

Westmere Winter Wonderland Disco, 30th June

WSS brings to you our very first event of 2022, with a winter-themed all-school disco! This will be a child only event, and if your child hasn’t been to one of our discos before, they are in for a fun-filled night of excitement and dancing!

Garnet Station Art Bar will be open for parents/families for the duration of the disco and will provide a cosy place to socialise while you wait.

We cannot run this event without parent volunteers! 

Please sign-up for the bake sale here and to help on the day here.

Tickets $10 (which includes a slice of pizza) are available at the office to pre-purchase from the 16th of June.

Bring cash for the bake sale, reusable glow sticks, drinks and snacks

Disco times:

• Year 1-2: 5.15pm-6.30pm
• Year 5-6: 6.45pm-8pm
• Year 3-4 can choose which session suits best

Other Opportunities

Western Springs College 2022 Open Week Tour

Tours will take place with WSC Principal Ivan Davis between 9 am to 10:30 am onsite on: 

• Monday 23 May to Friday 27 May 2022 (week 4)

• Monday 30 May to Thursday 2 June 2022 (week 5, before Queen's Birthday weekend)

These tours can be booked on our school website (limit of 40 families per tour).

Ponsonby Intermediate Open Day Tour