Library upgrade

The Board have been looking at the library blog and discussing the findings. They have agreed that we need to look into building a new library more closely. A sub-committee has been formed for this. The Library sub-committee met for the first time on Monday 29th September to look at ways to take the concept forward. They looked at funding options and possible locations for a new library.

The impact of the new government 1/18 ratio change for New Entrants and Year 1 children means that we will need more teaching spaces during 2008. It is our hope that we can free up the existing library for teaching spaces by building the new library and ESOL space together. However the reality is that this will take longer than a year, so we need to look at how we can find spaces for the new children at the end of 2008, when we will need to open more classes than we have in the past.

The current Library can house much of the computer and shelving needs of the completed library, and it seems sensible to buy those things now and then move them into the library when it is completed in a year or so. Therefore I would like to request that some of the money raised by the Spring Ball be spent on this. There are two main reasons for this:

1. The money raised by the Ball should be spent on today’s children.
2. The library needs to be improved for 2008 not just 2009 and beyond.

My report to the PTA

I would like to thank the PTA for providing tea, coffee and phenomenal Afghans after my talks at the start of term. Those nights were a really important opportunity for me to connect with lots of people and talk through ideas about education and the development of the school over the next few years and the refreshments helped greatly.

I would like the PTA to help promote my blog (fendalton-principal.blogspot.com) as a good source of information about what is happening in school and another way of keeping in contact with the school community and me. Rob has been working with some of the PTA on setting up their own blog.

Blogging is a very powerful tool which allows us to very quickly make web announcements and keep websites active and live. We need to look closely at how we are going to organise it in terms of moderation of comments and postings but at the moment it is a good start for the PTA to learn some of the possibilities.

The real power of blogging is in subscriptions as this allows the school community to be automatically notified of updates without having to go to the web to check. I will be putting some guides to making effective use of blogs onto my blog in the coming weeks.

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.