2020 Camp Fundraising

This is a camp year and all of our Year 4 - 8 children are expected to attend a camp as part of our school curriculum. Year 7&8 will have a 3 night adventure camp at Makahika Outdoor Pursuits Centre and our Year 5&6s will have a 2 night challenge camp at Forest Lakes. Both of these camps are near Levin and both camps will be held in the last week of Term 3. Year 4s will have an overnight marae stay at Wellington High School at the end of the year.

Camps are wonderful experiences and we believe that they are important opportunities for children. They do cost though, and we are very aware of the financial burden they present for some families. For this reason we asked you in last week's newsletter to let us know if you did not support us running camps and fundraising for them. We need to know now if families are not able to financially support us to run camps this year or if our community do not want camps to be part of our school curriculum. If camps are to go ahead, we need to get on with fundraising for them.

We heard back from 8 parents, and are pleased that you read the newsletter and that you took the time to get in touch. No one told us they didn't support camps going ahead and only 1 family told us that they'd rather not be involved in fundraising. Some of you sent in fundraising ideas and one or two even offered to help. We are assuming that everyone else is also supportive of camps going ahead this year and happy to get involved in fundraising for them.

In response to the feedback we've received (both last week and in the past) we've developed a fundraising plan specifically for our 2020 camps. We'll do some fundraising activities at school during the remainder of Term 2 and during Term 3, and offer further fundraising opportunities to families.

The fundraising we do at school must be limited to activities that are easy to organise and do not take our focus off our main job. All money raised from these school based fundraisers will be spread across all children and will reduce the overall cost of camp for everyone. We still need parent help to do these school based fundraisers.

We are looking for parents to take a lead role in facilitating other fundraising activities that families can choose to take part in or not. If you undertake out of school fundraising, the money you raise from sales or sponsorship will come off your child's camp costs.

We'll be invoicing Year 4-8 families next week for the cost of their respective camp, minus our estimated fundraised amount per child. We are requesting a small deposit now (as we've had to pay camp deposits already) but the full amount won't need to be paid until 2 weeks ahead of the first day of camp. We encourage you to set up an automatic payment to spread the load and avoid a larger bill later.

School camps are part of our curriculum and we cannot enforce a compulsory payment from families. Obviously, if the majority of parents did not pay their child's camp costs as a voluntary donation, we would not be able to run camps at all. We know that there will be some families who are unable to pay the full cost of camp and encourage those families to contribute any amount that they can manage. If you know that camp costs are not affordable for you, please let us know as soon as possible.

Every camp year we have some generous families offer to pay extra or to sponsor another child to go on camp. If this is something that you'd like to do we'd love to hear from you too.

For more detail about the fundraising that we are planning to do, and the options available to parents, please see our Camp Fundraising Plan 2020. We thank all of our parents for supporting both our school curriculum learning and our fundraising efforts.

Kathryn Smith

Principal