Board 2021 Term 1 Newsletter

Kia ora tatou!

Welcome to a new year at Te Kura o Tawatawa-Ridgway School!

An especially warm welcome to all new families who have joined our school community this year, we look forward to getting to know you.

Building works and school drop-off/pick-up

It is great to see the building work underway. It is going to be a fascinating year for our tamariki as they watch their new school being built. However, the building work brings extra pressure especially at school drop-off and pick-up times. Although they are not using the car parks immediately outside the school, we can expect a knock-on impact from contractors and building vehicles parked in the area this year, as well as from the need for vehicles to access the building site.

We encourage you to make use of alternative means of transporting your children to school - there are two walking buses your children could join, one from Kingston and one from Vogeltown. If you need to use your car, please allow extra time as you may need to park further away from the school than normal.

Also a friendly reminder at drop off and pick up times to remember the road rules. Parking illegally on the dashed yellow lines at the crossings puts our tamariki at risk - they may not be visible to other drivers, please do not park on yellow lines at any time.

There is a building diary where you can keep up to date with the school rebuild project. This will also include details of work to reinforce our zigzag path expected to happen in the April school holidays.

Kura Ahurea

The Board are delighted that Tawatawa-Ridgway School has been invited by local Mana whenua to participate in the Kura Ahurea cultural programme this year. Teachers have committed to interweave half an hour of te reo each day and lead teachers will attend termly hui based at Hikoikoi in Petone, so schools can support each other through sharing resources, ideas and experiences.

Attendance at School

It is part of the Board's role to monitor attendance at school. Here at Te Kura o Tawatawa-Ridgway School we have a generally good level of attendance, however it has been brought to our attention that around half of our school absences are due to children being taken on holiday. We understand it is sometimes necessary to take children out of school in term time due to unavoidable family commitments. However, when booking a holiday, we encourage parents to consider the disruption not only to their children's education, but also the impact on teaching and learning at school from children's absence.

Report on 2020 achievement

As Auckland is moved in and out of Alert Level 3 again, we are reminded of the ongoing impact of Covid-19 on our tamariki here in New Zealand, and also those tamariki across the world who's schooling has been far more severely disrupted over the last year. At our last Board meeting, we reviewed the 2020 school-wide achievement results and it was gratifying to see that achievement levels remained consistent with the previous 4-5 years. This is in large part due to the commitment of teachers and our leadership team during the AL3 and AL4 lockdown periods, and also their decision to focus on hauora/wellbeing, building relationships and play-based learning on their return to school - this has had good results. Thank you teachers!

School policies

Tawatawa-Ridgway School policies and procedures can be viewed on our School Docs website. We encourage parents to familiarise themselves with school policies and procedures. They are reviewed regularly by the Board. (The user name is Ridgway and the password is RRRR.)

Board information

Along with the school policies, the Board pages on the school website are where you can find out about Board members new and old, access meeting minutes and other information about the board.

We are always keen to hear feedback, comments and ideas from the Ridgway School community. Feel free to email the board at ridgwaybot@gmail.com.

You are also welcome to come to board meetings to speak to the board on a particular topic, please let us know in advance if you would like to attend. We meet twice a term, usually in week 2 and week 8.

Ngā mihi nui,

Ridgway School Board of Trustees

Contact:

Barbara Dean

Board Chairperson

ridgwaybot@gmail.com