Principal's Comment

 Kia Ora Kevinians and Supporters of the College,

This week has been a very busy one for me personally as I have had a lot of meetings to attend in Dunedin and online as well as having returned on Sunday from the Bishop's Shield competition. The advantage to that however, is that when you are moving between agencies and presenters, it is easy to identify common threads and get a real sense of what is 'on top' for educational stakeholders.

Without a doubt, the major issue being put under the microscope at the moment is school attendance and the consequences of students not attending on a regular basis. The general feeling seems to be that Covid has somehow diluted our urgency around ensuring that our young people attend school. There have always been truants, but the message is that across the country there is a real drop in attendance rates among those students who, in the past, would have been at school 90% of the time which is the indicator the Ministry of Education uses.

In order to help caregivers identify the real attendance of our students, we have moved from posting half days on our reports to posting a whole day percentage. If your young person is not attending school for 90% of the time or more, they are counted as not being in 'regular attendance'.

Whilst Covid isolation rules, immunity debt and subsequent sickness have all played their part, our message to whānau is please make being at school a priority for your young person and if there are barriers for you and / or your student, please let us know how we can help.

Have a great weekend everyone

God Bless

Jo Walshe

Principal's Comment

 Kia Ora Kevinians and Supporters of the College,

This week has been a difficult week with extreme highs and lows and I am sure many of the staff and students of the College will be very happy to see the weekend arrive. Our thoughts and prayers have been with the members of our community this week who have suffered as a result of the accident on Tuesday night. As always when something this awful happens in our community, the ripple effects are felt far and wide. We pray for God's peace for all of those involved and we continue to offer our support.

This week we hosted 'Open Day' at the College which was well attended. Open days are not only a chance to show our community what goes on at our College, but they also cause us to reflect on what is important in the culture of our school and how we are able to celebrate that. We have had strong enrolment numbers and I would like to remind anyone still considering putting in an application that these are due at the end of next week.

This morning I watched the Year 9 performance rotation perform their lip syncs. They were great, and they all had a lot of fun playing with the new lighting system we have in the auditorium. This system digitalises the sound system and means we can link audio visual technologies such as speakers, projectors systems and TV's. Thankfully we have amazing young students who can actually drive all this tech!

Have a restful and hopefully sunny weekend.

God Bless

Jo Walshe