Reflections 2014

Celebration Day Speech 2014

Year 13 Graduate Warrior-Scholars 2014

Kia ora tatou

Welcome everyone to our Celebration Day.  It’s great to have you all join us to reflect on a very busy 2014 and to join us in celebrating  thevery wide range of achievements of many of our students this year.

Each year I stand up here to talk about the major issues we face in an education system that has never suited our kids, and still doesn’t.

I complain that this situation gets worse every year with a narrower curriculum and very poor definitions of success and achievementwhich paint a picture of our kids as problems, that the government wants to “fix” –  that hasn’t changed, so I don’t want to talk about that today.

I also stand here each year to talk about our achievements as a school – and there are many.  People continue to visit us regularly to find out how we do, what we do.  I speak to audiences all over the country who want to know HOW we make such a difference.  Magic happens in Studio 274 where our students flock after school and  Ido want to congratulate the Studio for the amazing opportunities they give our young people, and the youth in our wider community.

Our students have been successful in many different aspects of their learning – academically,  in Samoan, Maori, Tongan – and Englishspeech competitions, in Pasifika performing arts – in national and regional kapa haka competitions, and in sports and I want to thank all those who gave so much time to tutor our groups and coach our teams.

But you are going to spend the rest of the day seeing for yourselves our achievements as a school, through the many achievements of our students – so I don’t want to talk about that either!

What I do want to talk to you about this year is my English class,because it has been a very long time since I have actually had to be a teacher, but this year, when our usual teacher took study leave, both Whaea Cindy and I thought we’d go back into the classroom!

I could probably say I wasn’t a teacher this year either, but I, and my NCEA Level 3 English students, were all definitely learners! 

The students learned how grumpy I could be (not that they didn’t know that already!) and that I was going to stalk them until the work was done, and that there was no point in making excuses.

“I don’t do writing” Brodie told me in the first week.  He has achieved Merit grades for his writing and can write really well!

“I can’t do speeches” most of them told me – “I’m too shy” – the same ones I would see at full volume on the kapa haka stage.  Savili hid from me for weeks, then surprised me, and himself, by receiving an Excellence grade for his speech.

The person who learned the most, however, was me.

I learned our kids often doubt their real talent and ability, and they don’t have to.

I learned how hard it is for teachers, myself included, to stay motivated, and keep your students motivated while you are disappearing under the mountain of paperwork that NCEA requires.

My students were studying the stories of Witi Ihimaera aboutstruggle and conflict, and racism in our society – and I was havingmy own struggle and conflict with the racism and white spaces in our education system that try to force our kids into topics and assessments that don’t fit, and show them exemplars that don’t look or sound anything like them.

I also learned about the frustration teachers experience when kids just don’t turn up to school. “I slept in,” “no transport,” “family problems,”  “I had to help at home,” “I had to go to work,” are all real life situations I know, and all are legitimate – some of the time – but I often wonder if whanau realise how these multiple days off accumulate, and what a huge impact they have on your child’s achievement overall.  I also wonder if you realise how often the teacher has to repeat that one lesson for the students who were missing?  Our teachers’ workload and our children’s learning suffer hugely from absence and lateness.

The most significant thing you can do to help your child achieve, is to get them to school on time, and every day.

I learned that Level 3 English has not so much to do with Englishitself. As any teacher can tell you, it’s about relationships, it’s aboutbeing there, as a mentor, a guide, a coach – at all times of the day or night – as the emails I’d get at midnight taught me.  “What did we have to do for tomorrow” they would ask?  I learned though that even when I answered immediately, Savili, having asked his question, had happily already logged off and gone to sleep!

I learned, or more accurately, I remembered all over again, that teaching is a really hard job that requires many, many, hours of preparation and assessment time outside of class time.

I learned that it can be thankless, and it can also be amazingly rewarding, when “I don’t write” and “I can’t speak” turn into statements like “I’m a writer” and “I’m a speaker” – and you see results like those you will see shortly from Claudia, in Whaea Cindy’s class, whose poetry slam impressed me so much I invited her to be our guest speaker today, and my friend, Savili, whose speech blew me away!

It has been a real privilege to work more closely with our students than I am usually able to do, and I am very proud of our joint achievements and the learning we did together.

So today I’m saluting, and thanking our teachers, and the incredibly hard work they do, day and night, weekends and holidays, for all our kids.  I’m pretty certain, I am never going to teach again.  I’ll stick to just being the principal, which I think might be much easier.

My thanks also to our great support staff, and to Julie, and our Board of Trustees, who all work hard in their support of our students and our school.

I congratulate all of our young people who we will honour and celebrate today and give special thanks and best wishes to all of our graduating Year 13 Warrior Scholars who will soon be joining us on the stage.  They are heading off into university study, careers and employment, and I know they will all continue to make us proud of their achievements.

I wish all of you – and all families – best wishes for Christmas and the New Year.

Kia ora tatou

Reflections 2013

Celebration Day Speech 2013

Kia ora tatou

Welcome everyone to our Celebration Day.  It’s great to have you all join us to reflect on a very busy 2013.  Soon we will be celebrating the very wide range of achievements of many of our students this year,but I wanted to also talk this morning about our achievements as a school, which I think sometimes we don’t publicise enough!

Last year I spoke about  the government’s pressure on schools to conform to a one-size-fits-all framework –  which treats our children as consumers, schools as businesses, learning as pass rates and percentages,  and which has never worked for our Maori and Pasifika learners.  This year the situation is actually worse.  New research  has confirmed the damage done by the government’s National Standards which force schools to teach to the standards and leave out other important curriculum areas, and which label children as failures.

We also face other pressures in our community.  The most serious for us, across all Otara schools, is a drop in roll numbers – which means a drop in our staffing and the loss of staff, some who have been here for a long time.

Yesterday we farewelled Whaea Haley, who has been here for 17 years and who is off to study to finish her masters degree.  At the beginning of next year we will be saying goodbye to Matua Rihari – also taking on further study, and we farewell Mr Piho who has taught in this school for 30 years and is due for his well-deserved retirement!  We wish all of those staff members the very best in their future pathways – but the fact remains we need to focus on recruiting and retaining our student numbers.

So, against all of that background that is going on “out there” we continue to make a difference, not just to our own students, but to an ever widening network of other schools and communties who are interested in what we do and how we do it.

This year we have hosted visitors from Vietnam, Australia, several different universities in the United States, New Caledonia,  Hawaii, the Cook Islands, and teachers from a Samoan Language Centre based in Hawaii.

We have been visited by school architects and planners from across NZ, as well as groups of teachers from several other schools, some as far away as Christchurch.   I have been invited to speak to audiences in Parliament Buildings, to National Maori ERO reviewers, to principals’ associations in Otago, to the Ministry of Education and local iwi in Christchurch, to teachers groups, teacher trainees, and to indigenous educators in Hawaii.

Why are all of these people interested in Kia Aroha College?  Because we are already doing what they want to learn how to doand all this interest is an indicator of the importance and unique nature of our programme and philosophy. We believe our young people have the right to learn about their cultural languages, knowledge and identity as well as achieve academic success.  It doesn’t sound all that unusual to us, because it’s just what we always do – but to all those other people, it’s different, and sometimes I think we forget to celebrate that difference and to pat ourselves on the back!

This year it was a real privilege to complete my doctoral thesisbecause it tells the story of our struggle as a community to stand up for what we believe works best for our kids.  I was lucky enough to be the storyteller, but it’s our story and we are all in the text.  I want to thank everyone at Kia Aroha for their amazing support of this achievement, but the achievement belongs to all of us.

This year Kia Aroha College students participated in the ASB Polyfest and Tongan speech competitions, in the Ahurea Kapa Haka competition, Nga Manu Korero, the Youth Parliament Speech Contest, the Mana Party’s Feed the Kids initiative, we hosted the Auckland Samoan speech competitions and six of our students travelled to Wellington to the National Samoan speech contest.  We held our first School Ball, and have been involved on the sports field in soccer, netball, rugby, and rugby league, as well as other sports.

Through our partnership with Studio 274 – two of our students were selected to attend the Adobe Youth Voices Summit in Boston, USA.

All of these great opportunities happen alongside what happens in class, and again I want to thank our teachers, all our support staff and our Board of Trustees  for the incredible hard work they do in support of our school and our programme.  It’s great to be able to report that we have just been told that our students’ NCEA work,which is sent away for check marking by national moderators, has reached an all time high of 93% agreement between  our teachers’ and the moderators’ marking.  The national average agreement is 84%. That is a major achievement.

Our Whanau Centre now includes our Youth Health Nurse, two social workers, a youth worker, as well as counselling and the Mana Kidz rheumatic fever and skin infections programme.  Our students are very lucky to have this level of support available right here at school.

So let’s remember all these collective achievements today as we enjoy the many successes of our students.

My congratulations to all of our young people who we will honour and celebrate today and my special thanks and best wishes to all of our graduating Year 13 Warrior Scholars who will now be joining us on the stage. 

I wish all of you – and all families – best wishes for Christmas and the New Year.

Kia ora tatou

Reflecting on 2012

The following 2012 Celebration Day speech highlights important events and issues we faced as a school, and as a profession, in 2012.

Kia ora tatou

Welcome everyone to our Celebration Day.  My thanks to all of you who have come to join us in celebrating our achievements in 2012 – and, as usual,  it has been a busy year!  This year we took the lead role in the huge ASB Polyfest – as the host school for the Maori stage and convener of the overall event, and where, for the first time, we entered groups in all our Pasifika performing arts. 

We expanded our Whanau Centre, and the social work and health support we are able to provide for families, and, as always, we challenged ourselves to meet our own high academic expectations.   We are a decile one school.  Out of 32decile one, two and three schools in Auckland our NCEA results last year placed us

• ·        10th for our NCEA level 1 results
• ·        7th for NCEA level 2
• ·        1st equal (with 5 other schools) for NCEA level 3
• ·        and 4th for our University Entrance  results. 

Our students have spoken out in many different forums and in April, five of our senior students brought an international audience in Vancouver to their feet, and to tears, when they presented their outstanding research about the way working as a whanau in this school, works for them.  What is special about Kia Aroha College is that we believe our young people have the right to excellence in their cultural languages, knowledge and identity as well as academic success.   I want to thank our parents and families, for your support for this very special character and the philosophy of our school. 

Again in 2012 we have hosted visitors from all over New Zealand and the worldto see the work we do – and today I’m delighted to welcome to our Celebration Day Professor Suzanne Soohoo from Chapman University in California, and her husband Pat.  Suzi’s areas of expertise in multicultural education, critical pedagogy, and culturally responsive practice and research are exactly what Kia Aroha College is all about – and we are privileged to have people like Suzi speak about us all over the world.  Sometimes I think we are more famous and more celebrated in California than we are in New Zealand – and that is no surprise to me unfortunately!

In 2012, across the country, principals’ associations and teacher groups have taken action against the current government’s pressure on schools and communities to conform to a one-size-fits-all framework –  which treats our children as consumers, schools as businesses, learning as pass rates and percentages  and which has never worked for our Maori and Pasifika students. This type of bullying forced us out of our partnership with Moerewa School’s senior students and closed their senior class at the end of Term 1.  In spite of this action I am proud of the support that our board and staff were able to provide for the Moerewa community. 

 I want to thank our Board of Trustees for their strength and courage and my personal thanks particularly to Julie for her leadership and her commitment.  It’s not easy to stand up for what’s right in this hostile education environment and our board has a long and successful history in that struggle.

Last year I was invited to speak at the New Zealand Principals’ FederationEducation Summit.  The president of theFederation, described agovernment that has lost all sense of direction for education, that undermines the trustworthiness and integrity of our profession as educators, that reduces communities’ self-determination and increases state control, that sets up a system that assumes every child is the same,  and allows the government to divest itself of the responsibility for the inequalities in society and the issues – like poverty –  that impact on our children’s success – and deliberately makes these issues the responsibility of the school. 

That hasn’t changed in 2012 and one of the worst aspects of that thinking is the way it paints teachers and boards and schools themselves as the problems.  It is harder and harder to be a teacher in this current climate so today I want to specially appreciate our wonderful staff – our leadership team and our teachers and support staff who walk alongside our students’ whanau, in their support of our young people.  I want to acknowledge the hours and hours of extra work that students and parents never see, the extra professional learning and study to continually advance their practice, the cultural knowledge and experience they instil, their advocacy for Kia Aroha College, the many nights our Tupuranga staff sleep with large groups of students on our marae, the huge meals they cook, thenurturing, supporting, challenging, motivating and the difference all of our staff make in our young people’s lives. 

At our Year 13 dinner last week, as our graduating “Warrior-Scholars” stood to thank their teachers, our collective pride in their achievements, their goals and their chosen pathways to university, to future trades, and to further service in our community made several of us shed some tears.  Some of them told us they had looked forward to their graduation dinner for seven years so again I make a plea to parents to support your 15, 16, 17 year olds to stay at school right to the end of this important Year 13 year – not just so they can go to dinner – but so you can see what we saw, and what will be obvious when our graduating students take the stage shortly.  We are so very proud of you all and we know you will continue to do great things.

Finally, my congratulations to all of our young people who we will honour and celebrate today.