Thursday 25 October 2018

1. Principal's News Week 2 Term 4 2018

Rainbow Memorial Garden
Thank you to Mrs Brookes and our Dominican Choir who sang the "Rainbow Song" to commemorate the opening of the Rainbow Memorial Garden at the children's cemetery in the holidays.  It was a beautiful occasion.







Policy Review
Our Religious Education and Improving Educational Outcomes for Maori Students are presently open for review on our Schooldocs site.  Instructions to get there are:

The community login for the site is at schooldocs.co.nz. To login, click the link and enter the following details when prompted:: username: stjosephsoamaru, password: veritas

Next year we are starting the process of reviewing our curriculum and we would like to include Te Ao Maori more explicitly in our curriculum and particularly a local perspective.  It would be great to engage with our Maori families more at that time to explore your ideas around this.

Healthy Eating
The Heart Foundation Visual
St Joseph's is a health promoting school.  We are constantly having robust conversations about what this means.  I had a meeting with our Heart Foundation nutrition advisor last week where one of the things we discussed was health promotion in terms of school fund-raising and we are doing OK with this.

The items for sale at our Food Fair are mainly vegetable, grain and meat dishes.  We make efforts to cut back on sugar and junk food and there will be a small amount of items that fit this category at our Food Fair.  Our Home and School committee members advocate for balance and to keep these things in a small place in the overall spectrum.  Many of our community also believe that making foods taboo can have a worse effect than keeping a small amount in perspective.  All of that fits within the parameters of my Heart Foundation conversation last week and our Healthy Food policy.  So we hope you enjoy the healthy food made by our International families - it is always delicious too!

Uniform
Thank you for your feedback on uniform review.  Here is a reminder of the process which I shared with the Home and School last term and with the community via the newsblog:

The whole community has been asked for feedback via survey, the Home and School through their meeting was specifically asked to give feedback or ideas.  The deadline for these was the end of last week.  The request was if you are happy with the uniform that you didn't need to reply to the survey, and if you had suggestions to use the survey.  We had 44 replies.  Of those, 5 said they were happy and 39 made suggestions.  We assume the remaining 100 or so families are either happy or don't respond to surveys.  The board will consider responses in its meeting next week and if it decides changes are warranted proposed changes will be brought back to the community.  Please note that this is not a decision that the principal or any individual board members make, it is a policy and a full board decision, taking community feedback into consideration.

If changes are made, the timeline would hope to tie in with our policy update in term 1 and there would be an overlap period of implementation.


Burns Art Memorial
Here is the St Joseph's artwork that was displayed at the exhibition.

I'm writing this newsblog early this week and looking forward to sharing camp for the rest of the week with Mrs Herbst and the Year 7s at Wainui.

God Bless and Aroha
Lorraine Frances-Rees




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