Newsletter Term 2 Week 4

NEWSLETTER

TERM 2 WEEK 4 2024

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

SUBSCRIBE TO APP GROUPS 

Di has refreshed this and named each group with 2024 so you know it’s relevant and up to date. You will all need to join the groups specific to your tamariki.

This has important notices for either the whole school or specific groups eg: Bus Students, Sports, Cultural, Hubs, etc that you can join according to what your child’s involved in.

Many notices or reminders go out via the APP so it is an important tool for parents to be aware of what is due eg: permission slips and dates for events offsite, transport required etc. This is also an efficient way to provide absence notices.

In many cases, parental permission may be given via the app as well.

UNIFORM EXPECTATIONS

Our uniform and the way we wear it is connected to our PRIDE values. Taking PRIDE in our kura and our appearance as well as acknowledging the necessity to be sunsafe sits behind our decision to introduce a Bulls School Bucket Hat as a part of our regulation uniform. This has been an expectation since the beginning of 2023. Hats are available online or in-store for $20 and they come in 2 different sizes. Once you have yours PLEASE clearly name/label it. Matching 175 potae to 175 heads is much simpler when they are clearly named.