From the Principal
This week you will be receiving details of the candidates in the triennial NZSTA School Board elections. We have received nominations from 7 candidates for 6 seats on the school board. These nominations come from both current Board members, as well as members of our school community seeking election for the first time. We thank all the candidates in advance for offering their skills, time and leadership in the service of our school.
Pigeon Mountain Primary School has a proud tradition of high numbers of votes being returned when compared to other schools in Auckland and across Aotearoa NZ. Please support us in maintaining this record by casting your online votes once you receive your voting details and candidate statements in the coming week or so. Polls close on 7th September, meaning you have several weeks to read each candidate’s statement and consider who would best represent our community in the crucial role of leading our wonderful school forward.
Cross Country
We would like to thank our community for the wonderful support our children received on last week’s Cross Country day! We strive to provide our students with a diverse range of opportunities, and our goal is to celebrate the students who show resilience at the back of the field as vocally and positively as those children who finish the race at the front of the field. Having a vocal crowd of parents supporting us with this shows how well our school values are enacted not just by our students and teachers, but by our parents too! Thank you!!
Attendance at School
We read a number of recent articles about school attendance in Aotearoa NZ with interest. Dwindling school attendance post-COVID has been a focus for a great deal of media attention in the past few weeks, with eye-catching headlines about the number of students not attending regularly.
The Ministry of Education consider children’s attendance to be ‘regular’ when they attend 9 out of every 10 school days (90%).
In Term 1 2022 at the height of the Omicron outbreak, 46% of children in Aotearoa NZ were considered to be ‘regular’ attenders. At Pigeon Mountain School, around 42% children were classified as ‘regular’ during the same period, but our overall school attendance for the same period was 84% (meaning that 16 in every 100 students were absent on any one day).
In Term 2, we saw a significant increase in both figures for our students with the overall attendance hitting 90%, and the number of children considered to be ‘regular’ climbing close to 50%.
It is worth noting that a child who misses a week of school because of COVID- either catching it personally or having to isolate owing to a family member- would technically miss 10% of school for the term, classifying them as someone who does NOT attend ‘regularly’.
The lesson behind this is, that the media and their use of statistics can be very misleading- and as a community, you are doing a wonderful job of getting your children to school each day under current circumstances!
Source:
August Board Meeting – Date Change
The date for the August School Board meeting has been changed from Thurs 18th August to Wednesday 17th August. The meeting starts at its normal 7pm time.
Collecting Children during the school day
Thank you to those parents who have been contacting the office to arrange to collect their child from school and for avoiding collection during the school breaks.
Please remember to email general@pmps.school.nz or phone the school office09 534 9765 to arrange to collect your child.
It is difficult to find students during break times, so collecting students outside these times is appreciated. Unfortunately, if we are not notified in advance of a lunchtime collection, you may have to wait some time for us to track down your child!
Absence from School
Please report your child’s absence from school via our Website or Skoolloop App
