Report to the PTA - October 2007

Welcome back to a new term at school. I hope you all had a great holiday and managed to escape for a few days with your children. I spent part of my holidays moving house and part up in Auckland at a conference about learning and ICT. It was a wonderful course which gave me a whole heap of new ideas, that I will be sharing with the staff, about ways in which we can use the latest web technologies to improve the learning of all our children. Part of this involves the PTA and I would like to explore new ways for us to use the web to communicate the great work of the PTA to the community. I would like to set up a small group of interested PTA members to pursue some of these ideas. Any volunteers?

In April next year the Ministry is implementing a new 1-18 staffing ratio for New Entrant and Year 1 students, and this will impact our current teaching spaces. At the most recent Board of Trustees meeting we discussed this and the future of our school library and what developments we would like to see. We talked about combining any monies that may come into the school from the Ministry to help with junior staffing ratios to the building of a new library and ESOL block to free up new teaching spaces. A small group of staff on our Library QLC (Quality Learning Circles) has been carrying out a review of the Library and information systems that we currently have in place. This staff group will report back very soon so that we can make some decisions about the way forward. We would like to request that the money raised from the Spring Ball be put towards this library project.

Next week I will be holding the first of three meetings to formally introduce myself to the parents of the school. The meetings will be on the following dates:

Tuesday 16th October @ 8pm - Parents with children in the Junior School.
Wednesday 17th October @ 8pm - Parents with children in the Middle School.
Tuesday 23rd October @ 8pm - Parents with children in the Senior School.

All parents are welcome to attend and I would like as many people as possible to come so please spread the word! I will be using the meeting as a chance to meet lots (hopefully) of parents and to share with you my background, educational philosophy and vision for Fendalton. I am keen to gather people’s views and opinions during the evening so I hope people will come with lots of ideas.