Newsletter – 4th November 2019 – Pakuranga Heights School

Thank you to everyone who was able to support middle school athletics. The weather was perfect and staff and students had a great time. Don’t forget to check the dates below for the senior and junior athletics coming up soon.

TRAFFIC AND STUDENT SAFETY
Drop Off Zone
Thank you for your patience while we trialled a new system of getting your children safely into cars in our drop off zone. A few recent near misses prompted us to rethink how we do this better. Thank you parents for your feedback, this new system will be in place for the rest of the year.

Please drive to the very end of the drop off zone, close to the crossing, when picking up your children. This helps not only with children entering the vehicle safely, away from vehicles backing out of parking bays, but also with congestion on Udys Road.

Crossing
Please help us to keep your child safe by ensuring they use the school crossings before and after school. We have seen a number of children run across Cardiff Road without looking, completely disregarding their safety and quite often they are with an adult. We ask all parents to role model road safety as nobody wants to see or hear that their child has been hit by a car.

Facts
In New Zealand, child pedestrian injury is a leading cause of traffic related child deaths. More than 5 child pedestrians are killed each year, 100 are hospitalised. School age kids (5-9 year old) are the most at risk.

YOUR CHILD’S ATTENDANCE
Thank you for your support in ensuring your children are not only attending school each day, but are on time. At present our average attendance rate is 90 % which sounds really good but what does it mean?

A 90% attendance means your child:
1. is absent one day every two weeks
2. is absent one week a term
3. is absent a whole school month over the year

What about just being regularly late?
If your child is regularly late, does it impact on their well-being and learning? The following advice is adapted from an article called “Effects of Tardiness on your Child’s Education” 2016 which clearly explains how frequent lateness to school impacts on our children’s well-being and their learning.

Effects of tardiness on your child’s education
We all run late sometimes. For your child, arriving late to school occasionally won’t cause major disruption.
Inevitably, children will feel sick or tired some mornings, or other situations will prevent them from being on time.
But chronic lateness eventually takes its toll on a child’s overall educational experience.

Missing just 10 percent of the school year in the early years causes many students to struggle in primary school, and lateness in later years is associated with increased failure and dropout rates. Fortunately, parents can help prevent tardiness from becoming frequent enough to negatively impact their child’s school life.

Extended leave
The following statement is taken out of our school’s Policies and Procedures Manual and is in accordance with Section 25 and Section 31 of the Education Act 1989 which requires every board to take all reasonable steps to ensure students attend school when it is open:

“Students may not be withdrawn from school for extended lengths without the prior approval of Principal or Deputy Principals.”

Sue Kandasamy
Acting Principal

Leilani – Room 20

Upcoming events

Room 19 have created some mixed media artworks for our new classroom. Printed images were spliced and recomposed by the students, using coloured pencils and/or chalk pastels. Students used layering techniques to complete the picture.

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