Teenaa koutou e te whaanau o te kura tuarua o Te Oko Horoi,
Good afternoon to everyone in our CHS community,
This is the final communication from me for 2022 and what a challenging year it has been. The scale of disruption has made this the most demanding of all of the COVID years and one of the most difficult years I have experienced in education. Looking back on the past 3 years, I am incredibly proud of how we have minimised the health risks to our community, supported each other and responded to the endless shifting of goalposts. Although we have not yet seen the end of the disruption, we expect the scale of the interruptions to diminish. I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge how difficult it has been for us all to manage living under this pandemic. The challenge we have faced since the start of 2020 has been unprecedented and the accumulated effect of this has been draining. I have seen the toll it has taken on a lot of our students, staff and members of our community and the effects are still evident in the behaviours and motivation levels of many students. Living through this pandemic has caused hurt and division in our community and some of these wounds will take time to heal. In just one example, there has been a quantity of people in our community who lost loved ones but were unable to farewell them properly and my sympathy goes out to you for the personal cost you experienced during the pandemic. However, we have endured the worst of the challenge and pressure and come through it together. In many ways it will be easy for us to move on from the health risks of COVID, but the social impact looks likely to take longer to bounce back from. It will take a combined effort to fix some of the emerging challenges such as motivation and attendance levels. From what I have experienced over the past few years, we are certainly capable of bouncing back as a community, but we need to make sure that we start with looking after ourselves. Please take time to re-charge and refresh over the summer – we all thoroughly deserve some time out!
There are a few pieces of mahi that we wanted to share with you as we wrap up 2022:
- Lockdown feedback
- Start of year details for 2023
- NCEA update
- The Uniform Shoppe update
Ngaa mihi
Greg Thornton
Principal
