Principal's Page

Kia Ora Friends

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Last week we held a Community Consultation Evening - Kai and Talanoa, also known as A Snack and a Chat.

It was a resounding success - 98 parents from 23 different ethnic backgrounds attended.

We are a diverse family at Western Heights - as seen in the ethnicities data chart below. It is a challenge to find a way to acknowledge and celebrate all the cultures, values and beliefs that make up our WHS whānau, but one that we humbly welcome.

As I said to our attendees last Thursday, you have no idea how proud it makes our WHS team feel to see so much interest in and support for our school. Thursday night was a first step. It was a chance for us to start building a closer relationship with our parent community and a deeper understanding of families,  cultures and values. That understanding will help us make better connections with our families and help us do a better job nurturing and educating your precious children.

We focused on two questions:

Identify the five most important qualities and attributes of a great parent.

Rank them in order of importance.

These will be the qualities and attributes you would expect of yourself - and also of us as teachers.

Each group had to reach a consensus.

We have five foundation stone values that our school is built upon. 

These are:

• Whānaungatanga
• Whakamana
• Whakapono
• Manaakitanga
• Turangawaewae

How would you express these values in your cultural terms?

Some of these concepts will be bigger, deeper and more encompassing than the concepts we have used to express them. Try to also simplify these concepts down to a word or phrase, as well as the complex version.

The response was tremendous. Right from arrival, we saw parents mixing and mingling in diverse groups. The discussion within groups was deep and meaningful. Humour and imagination also fed into those considered responses.

When we asked the second question, we broke into ethnic groups. It was valuable and encouraging to again see the depth of thought and discussion that went into finding ways to culturally represent the concepts being focused on.

The results were written in Hindi, Mandarin, Pashtu, Sinhalese and a dozen more languages. I learned so much. The German language, for example, is brilliant at narrowing a complex phrase or feeling down into one comprehensive expressive word. A parent shared some interesting words - such as one for someone who is not a morning person, for example - morgenmuffle.

There is a plethora of material for me to analyse and collate - and it will take quite some time - but at the end of the process, we will have some ideas, values and aspirations from our community that we can feed into the kaupapa - culture and way of doing things -  of our school.

Massive thanks to our Western Heights staff team for their support on the night. It was entirely voluntary for them to attend, but 20 staff chose to do so, even though they had already had three long after-school meetings that week.

Mele, Carol and Sharon catered for our evening. Their goal was to have kai that represented the cultural diversity of our school. They succeeded admirably. 

As I have often stated, this Western Heights staff team is my 'Dream Team'. In 31 years as a principal of six different schools, I have never had a team like it. We are all blessed to have such exceptional people working together in the service of our children and community.

As always - if you have questions or concerns about anything school-related - email me at macash@mac.com, and I will get back to you asap.

My very best regards to you all,

Ash Maindonald

Principal.