Newsletter – 21 March 2022 – Pakuranga Heights School

Dear Parents

It has been a very messy start to the year for us all. Coming into a Red Traffic Light setting placed many restrictions on our usual programmes, events and activities. We saw the cancellation of all cluster sporting events, swimming, assemblies and face to face Parent Partnership Meetings.

Student attendance has increased slightly since the last newsletter bringing it up to 74% in the last week. Even though our attendance isn’t where we would like it to be, our focus has always been getting back to normal routines as much as possible. We have harnessed opportunities we wouldn’t always have like small class sizes, and came up with ways to maximize teacher time to engage and connect with students. Staff who are isolating due to being household contacts delivered online lessons and in some teams this was the Team Leader. This has been very successful and we hope many more students working from home will take up this great opportunity. The last thing we want is for our students to slip backwards in their learning and, more importantly, the social aspects school life offers.

Why do we not issue laptops and Ipads when students are isolating or working from home?
There are a number of considerations each time such as:

How many students onsite are using the devices?
How long is the isolation?
How many devices will we need to issue to students and families?
How long will it be before all devices are returned and in some cases repaired before classes can use them again? ( To date we have devices outstanding since the August 2021 lockdown)
A number of families prefer hard packs or a combination of online and hard packs.

We issued 250 devices during the first major lockdown last year. The level 4 lockdown lasted four weeks. It took 6 weeks after this to get all the devices back, cleaned and some repaired before the classes could use them again. We did the same in August of the 2021 year. All devices across the school are in lockable storage areas, so retrieving, reallocating by serial numbers all devices and cords is a major operation.

It is impossible to cater for every child in terms of their learning needs when they are learning remotely as we have a wide range of abilities but we can assure we do our best. There are learning links on our website to extend or cater for your child’s specific learning needs and cover any gaps. Your child’s teacher also keeps in regular contact.

Isolation is stressful, more so if you or your household members are unwell, so we appreciate the huge amount of positive feedback and suggestions we have received to date.

Student Safety
We want to encourage and grow student ownership around safety.

Please use the school crossings
We strongly encourage all students and parents to use the school crossings. Besides the obvious safety issues, it is also respectful to the student patrollers and staff who are giving up their time to ensure your child is safe.

Our staff and parents have witnessed a number of close calls when students and parents fail to use the crossing. Please help us keep our community safe by modeling the correct use of the crossing and encouraging your child to do the same.

A huge thank you to our two parent helpers – Lisa Thompson and Ellen Hollis, who have given up their mornings/afternoons to assist the school with crossing, giving teachers more time in class with their students.

Parent Partnership Meetings held in February
This was successful despite being conducted virtually due to the Red Traffic Light restrictions placed on schools. Thank you for your patience with the reminder emails and telephone calls you received from teachers about making an appointment. We know the value of partnership meetings and are therefore passionate about getting 100% attendance. However under pandemic conditions we are happy with the 77% overall average attendance this year. Further breakdown of attendance in the different teams are as follows:-

Junior School average attendance: 72%

Middles average attendance: 83%

Seniors average attendance 76%

Building Update
The progress of the hall slowed down when the builders discovered further water damage to the walls. Initially a 40% reclad was planned for but when the hall was opened up that quickly changed to 80% reclad. This resulted in a long wait for approval of funds from the Ministry of Education.

Rooms 18 &19 too, had further damage discovered and plans had to be adjusted for more cladding than expected, The wait is for a report from the cladding specialists which will have to be submitted to council for approval before they start again.

Coronavirus Updates
To date we have had eight staff and 15% of our student population infected with Covid-19. We continue to be vigilant around ventilation, cleaning of high touch surfaces, hand hygiene and the wearing of masks. As the hospitalization rates increase in Auckland please ensure you and your whanau remain safe.

Noho haumaru

Sue Kandasamy
Acting Principal

Advertised items are from paid advertisers or non-profit organisations and the content in these advertisements do not necessarily reflect the view of the school nor has the school endorsed their products.