Kia ora Parents and Caregivers,

It’s a very exciting day for our Year 13 cohort, as they prepare for tonight’s Ball. Postponed three times due to lockdowns and Alert Level restrictions, it was great to see our students so excited this morning in anticipation of the event. I hope a wonderful time is had by all.

I want to start by thanking all of you who have donated towards our Event Centre fundraising. We are humbled by your generosity and grateful for the support you have given us, as we seek to meet our funding shortfall. If you haven’t donated, you can find all the information you need in this newsletter. This facility will be a wonderful asset for our school and will become the home of our performing arts, school events such as assemblies and speech competitions, and a host of other activities. In short, it will become the heart of our school community – and our local community too.  We are very excited to be planning our Grand Opening, and we know it will transform the day-to-day experience for our students at school.

Term 4 has started with our sporting teams victorious across several codes. You can read more about our success under “Sport” in this newsletter. It’s also the time of year where we celebrate success across our school with Awards Ceremonies and Events, including Music, Sports, Leavers Afternoon Tea, Special Awards and Academic Prize-Giving. A full list of events is listed under “Things to Note”. We hope to see many of you at these functions as we draw our teaching year to a close.

Despite the obvious difficulties of the year, compiling our list of student successes has been heartening – Westlake has produced some outstanding results in 2020. Results that would be impressive even without lockdowns and adapted ways of teaching and learning.

So, as we head into the next two weeks of celebration, I want to extend my thanks to you – our Westlake whānau – for your support over this year and I hope you are able to join us at one or more of our ceremonies. More than usual, we are looking forward to acknowledging and celebrating our amazing and talented students.

Jane Stanley
Principal