Kia ora koutou
With today’s announcement by Government, we are implementing with urgency our plan to support your child’s learning from home. We appreciate this is a sudden and significant change, and will be heavily disruptive to many people in our community.For children of essential workers, we look forward to seeing your child here at school tomorrow morning from 8:30am. Children may wear mufti, and we ask ALL children to go to Kōwhai on arrival and sign in there with Paulette. You may wish to check if you are considered an essential worker - https://covid19.govt.nz/government-actions/covid-19-alert-system/ however those roles include doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers and police. We continue to ask that children who are not well, do not attend school. This option will also be available on Wednesday. After that, as the country moves into Level 4 of our COVID19 plan, school will be completely closed for attendance.
For all other children, school is now closed.
The government have advised that the holidays have been brought forward to begin on Monday 30th March. From tomorrow evening, we will have a page of optional learning activities available for you to select from for the rest of this week.
We will be supporting children's learning from your home with a menu of opportunities that you can select from. Our teachers have been beginning to develop a framework for this, and tomorrow and Wednesday will see our staff putting some of these ideas together in a place you can access them.
The learning options will be linked from our school website, and will include both 'online' and 'offline' options with plenty of choice available for families to select what will work for them.
We are aware that 'being connected' will support families with learning and with social connection.
To support learning, we have a small number of Chromebooks at school that we can loan to families who might need them for learning, particularly for older children. If you think this might be your family, please click on this link to let us know via a brief survey. You need to complete this BEFORE 3ppm tomorrow (Tuesday), so that we can work out how to allocate these on Wednesday and let you know to come in and pick them up on Wednesday.
The following information has come directly from the Ministry of Education and clarifies what support you can put in place around child care whilst the country is at a Level 4 position:
If you need to have your child cared for by someone else you will need to identify that person or people as part of your self-isolated group. This will need to be done by midnight Wednesday and the group must remain the same for the whole 4 week period. The caregiver’s own group (eg, their partner and children), your child and your own group (eg, your parents and other children) become one group. This group needs to be limited to minimise any risk of spread and should be no more than 20 people.
Your child will be looking to you for guidance about this decision. Parents, caregivers, whānau and teachers will have a particularly important part to play in reassuring children at this time. If you haven’t already done so, you may wish to read the information put together by the Ministry of Education to support your conversations with your children – Talking to children about COVID-19
As noted by the Prime Minister these restrictions are our best chance to slow the virus in New Zealand and to save lives. We all have a clear role here to slow the spread of COVID-19.
Please look out for more emails from school over the duration of this nationwide effort to keep our population safe and healthy. We will also post on our school Facebook page. We will continue to communicate with you during this time.
Thank you for your ongoing support of our school staff and school community.
Ngā mini nui, koutou
Sandy, and the amazing team, at Beckenham Te Kura o Pūroto