Korero te Tumuaki

Kia ora koutou,

My message today focuses on two things that are very current at the moment. The first is the strike action which is affecting our community and students. The second centres around a few students targeting other students racially. I have, personally, found this behaviour and sentiment appalling.

PPTA Strike Action

Whilst we agree that the Government and the Ministry of Education need to do better and teachers certainly need better conditions, the recent and ongoing strike action has negatively impacted our students and community. As the Principal my concern is always to ensure effective teaching and learning and as such our teachers are working hard to keep a positive and engaging learning environment at school despite the disruption of the strike action.

Major strike action such as this is nationwide and led by the PPTA and certainly not something that as a school we can easily influence the ramifications of. Under the conditions that have been set I have been impressed with the student-focused mahi of our teaching staff.

If you wish to share your concerns directly with PPTA, their email address is enquiries@ppta.org.nz and phone number 04 384 9964.

Racism in School

Our value for this term is Respect. It is such an important value to develop and grow our students' understanding so that they can treat all people equally and as ‘you would want to be treated yourself’. It is a fundamental quality that all our students will need for their life and future aspirations.

At our assembly this week, I spoke about prejudice and racism which has no element of respect for another person and we are seeing this from some of the students in our school.

I have attached a video clip from New Zealander of the Year, Taika Waititi, around this topic which I shared with our students. He has a very strong message (albeit a sarcastic one) for all of us.

In assembly I spoke about prejudice as seen through history with events such as:

Slavery - which has featured through many periods of world history over the centuries; 

Apartheid - which brought worldwide condemnation on the segregation that existed in South Africa as you can see in this image; and the Christchurch Mosques - on the 15th March 2019, 51 New Zealanders lost their lives to a self proclaimed racist.

There is no sign of respect for other humans in any of these! It shows a prejudice to a group of individuals and deliberate prejudice towards a religion, an ethnic group, a race, or citizens of a country.

The Human Rights Commission in NZ started a campaign a number of years ago called ‘Give nothing to racism’ which was supported by many famous NZers, many of whom have had racism directed towards them at some stage in their lives.

And ‘Giving nothing’ is a powerful range of actions to shut down racism as you can see in the slide.

If we use these actions, then we are taking action on prejudice and racist behaviours, comments and actions within our school.

The students were shown what actions they can take if they see this in our school grounds, which are below:

• Let a staff member know immediately what has occurred

• Seek help from those around you - friends, seniors, our Student Leaders and support the victim

• ‘Give nothing’ to the abuser - use those actions that I showed you in the previous slide.

• Be an upstander rather than a bystander - now I know this is hard but if we all stand up to this then when you make that stand, - you will find many more standing beside you.

To stop this - we have to recognise racism and take action so that we have a school that acknowledges, accepts and embraces differences in every student at Geraldine High School and is free from prejudice and racism no matter how small so everyone is treated with respect.

Tena koutou, Tena koutou, tena tatou katoa.