Kia ora  
Yesterday the Government decided that we will move into Alert Level 3 on Wednesday September 1st.  That means school will be open to receive some students from Wednesday morning 8:30am. We will start to prepare our school site from Monday.

The key message for you is that if you can, you should keep your child at home. You should only physically send your child to school if you are unable to supervise them at home as you return to work.

If your child has a health condition that means they are at a greater risk of a severe illness you must keep them at home.  If your child is sick, please also ensure you keep them at home.

In order to ensure the safety of those children and our staff who do come to school, we will be operating with strict enforcement of health and safety measures. 

For those children who do come to school, school will be very restrictive. Interaction with peers, play and learning activities will be extremely limited as 1 metre distancing inside and 2 metre distancing outside is expected. Children attending school will be supported to complete their distance learning activities. We are awaiting updated guidance on this as we expect there to be more guidelines to reflect the Delta variant. We will share these with those families who will have their children at school once we have determined how it is going to look at Upper Moutere.

For the vast majority of you, we will continue to support your child’s learning by distance. 

Please keep connecting with your teachers with any questions you might have.

Here is a reminder of the principles for Level 3(at this stage) when we get there. 

  1. Stay home. If you are not at work, school, exercising or getting essentials, then you must be at home, the same as at Level 4.   
  1. Work and learn from home if you can. We still want the vast majority of people working from home, and children and young people learning from home. At-risk students and staff should also stay at home, and they will be supported to do so. Early learning centres and schools will physically be open for up to Year 10 for families that need them. 

To allow our team to plan and physically prepare our learning spaces, we need to know who is returning to school from next week.  

We will need to know for the period of Lockdown Level Three please, as it will be difficult to for us to have students arriving at will as we will only have limited staff onsite each day. 

If you are returning to work part-time and your child is to attend part days or some days, that is fine, please let us know days and times now.  

If your circumstances change and your place of work reopens and you are unable to provide supervision for your child through family or friends, then please let us know ASAP so we can ensure we are ready to welcome your child back to school.  

We do not expect the bus to be running due to low numbers.  

The school day will begin at 8:30am and will finish at 3pm.  

For the majority of our children, we expect they will be at home continuing their Distance Learning.  

 What we need to know from you NOW please… 

Yes…My child(ren) will need to be attending school as there will be no one at home to care for them under Level 3.  Days and times please if known 

No… My Child(ren) does not need to attend. 

We need to hear from ALL of our school community by this Sunday evening 29 August so we can plan how we are going to staff and resource Level Three at school following the  strict Health and Safety Guidelines provided by the Ministry of Health. 

Can you please email Grant g.watson@uppermoutere.school.nz by tomorrow night.  

Looking forward to hearing from you. 

The Upper Moutere team