The phrase I’ve called this post is one I saw and definitely related to this time last week.  As I write this post I’m kicking myself – I should have started recording my experiences a week ago!

Our country is currently in a lockdown. We’ve been instructed by the government to ‘Stay Home to Save Lives’. Today is Day 7 of Lockdown – but let me take you back a couple of weeks.

Principals are leaders of learning – people who focus on the learning within their school and classrooms – all with a focus of ensuring our children leave as the best that they can when they move from our school.  I have never felt further removed from this as I have over the past three weeks.  Along with an impending ERO visit (that should have started two days ago), and the increasing awareness of what first came known to us as ‘CaronaVirus’ and is now clearly known by it’s scientific name – COVID-19 – we have had learning opportunities of other sorts.

We had a Pandemic Procedure in our school – however it never prepared us for the reality of a pandemic.  Prior to March 12th – when the World Health Organisation declared this as a world wide pandemic – it was a thorough procedure – but the reality was different. The need to ensure everyone is educated – teachers, students and parents – about what we were doing and why (ie that we weren’t overreacting) was important.  What did we do in addition to our procedure?

• Ministry of Health posters about handwashing, coughing expectations
• The presence of flowing soap, cleaning fluids and hand sanitiser EVERYWHERE we could!
• Adding paper towels to our toilets and switching off the hand driers
• No personal touching – no shaking hands, hugging, high fives (do you realise how many of these we do a day!!?)
• Enacted on the daily emails that were coming from the Ministry of Education
• Starting to plan ahead in regards to staff not being able to come to school (who had particular health conditions and/or immune compromised – or over 70 years of age.
• Give parents the opportunity to remove their child from school if they were immune compromised.
• Keeping information timely to staff and the wider community.
• Constant contact with the Board Chair as to what we were enacting.
• Cancelled assemblies (as these were gatherings of more than 100 people)
• Sports events were cancelled (touch, swimming sports, rippa rugby tournaments)

By March 16th we were starting to put out daily COVID-19 updates to our families, a family had cancelled their trip to Hawaii to meet up with their Canadian family for a very special family celebration, and on a personal level we were starting to wonder if our family holiday to Bali was actually going to be able to go ahead.

While not being able to have our usual assemblies I took the ‘certificate’ children and house captains for that week’s assembly and ran a recorded assembly in our Ruma Nui. This was recorded by a Year 8 student and posted on our school FB page to enable the rest of the classes and parents to still celebrate our acknowledgements for the fortnight.  No hand shakes on presentation of the certificates turned into foot taps, and the assembly had only 30 children present – but over 700 views on Facebook!

View our ‘online assembly’ here.

As a Principal I can’t remember ever having a time where I was so obsessed with an issue – and why?  Things were changing so quickly.  I needed to ensure the emails I was receiving were being enacted, I needed to ensure the news I was hearing (that was sometimes changing by the hour) was being enacted on – and needed to be considering the potential change that meant for us as a school.

At our daily morning staff briefing at 11am I was usually able to give the staff an update from the MoE email, this information was often different information than we were filtering out to the community.  The community needed to know what we were doing at school – our school discussions needed to be about what we would do at the next stage – and each day seemed to be a next stage!

Sunday 22nd March and NZ is given the information that we are at a COVID-19 Level 2 Alert.  At Level 2 all 70+ year olds and anyone who is immune compromised are instructed to stay at home and not mix with the general public. Border restrictions were increased, travel was restricted to necessary travel only and people were asked to work from home if possible. For us as a school it had an impact – there would be some students who wouldn’t be able to come to school, some staff would be in the same boat. We started to think about how this would look for us.  I organised to meet with my DP and Board Chair the following morning to think about what it meant for us.

Monday 23rd March was Anniversary Day and we met in the morning.

My DP and I reorganised our TOD (planned for the 24th) due to our facilitator no longer being able to travel from afar as it wasn’t deemed ‘essential travel’. It was still to be a productive day and we would have been achieved a lot. After this we met with our Board Chair and agreed on the following:

• No additional visitors into our school – this included RTLB, RTLit, Itinerant music teachers, MoE Special Ed, Sports coaches
• Begin to think as a staff what distance learning might look like if we are asked to implement this.
• Cancel all class trips that were planned
• A plan put into place for before and after school so that parents weren’t on site. This included a rolling finish to our days, and teachers meeting students at the gate in the morning. This involved teachers at the gate to welcome students (and assure parents they would be fine!)
• Acknowledging that anyone on site who showed signs of not being well would be asked to leave.
• Asking all parents to be vigilant with children who show signs of being unwell, and letting them know that we would send anyone home who wasn’t well.

All of the above was all with the intention of keeping things as normal as we could, but minimising the contact children on our site would have with others. We wanted to assure them that we understood there weren’t any COVID cases in our community but that we were being proactive to ensure the safety of our students and staff.

HOWEVER – that plan was out of date within two hours of constructing it with the next announcement . . .  (see next post)