Kia ora koutou,
First of all, apologies for my cryptic email regarding our visit from What Now. I was contacted about it early in Term 1 but also told it wasn’t a done deal. So I put it on the back burner thinking…what are the chances! And then one week out from the pencilled date they contacted me with the green light – and mountains of paperwork! It was a fantastic day and the only regret was that bringing whānau in created another level of public liability that was difficult to navigate in the short time frame – so we decided to take the opportunity to involve as many students as possible and run with it. You can enjoy some of the photos above as well as some uploads to our social media. The minute we find out when it will be aired, we will let our community know.
Winter sports are underway and the weather has taken a turn to remind us that these are played in chilly and sometimes quite unpleasant conditions. As I said last week – as supporters, always remember the positive aspects of being involved in sports and…be supportive. We want our tamariki to enjoy the games while also developing their skills.
You will see I have included a notice about attendance in this newsletter. Attendance is a hot topic via the media and we support the kaupapa of regular and consistent attendance as we know it impacts on learner outcomes over time. What is difficult to balance is the need to keep children home when they are sick versus a good attendance record. We put our trust in your judgement, you are parents and make calls every day that impact your tamariki. If your child goes downhill while at school or is exhibiting signs of being quite unwell, we will give you a call. Together, teaching good hygiene habits also helps. The attendance data for Bulls School for Term 1 tells us that 40% of our tamariki had 5 or more days away last term. That’s not a great percentage – we can do better.
What is further impacting our kura is staff illness. This is also a challenge to manage and we have already had to split classes due to a lack of relievers. We do our utmost to keep things ‘trucking along’ but there are unavoidable barriers at times. Some schools are even back to closing due to staff illness – fingers crossed it doesn’t come to that.
Friday was Pink Shirt Day. School playgrounds can be sources of unkind behaviours and we are never ok with this. What helps is that we hear about any incidents so we can do something about it. We know that our PRIDE values support the majority of our tamariki to be the best they can be, but the reality is children (and adults) can be unkind sometimes. I think the words of Dame Whina Cooper below share the sentiment that encourages us all to think about the way we speak and act:
Mauri ora, Kim Gordon, Tumuaki
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