It was a pleasure to host Tania Savage from Cardinal McKeefry School and Mary-Angela Tombs from St Teresas School at our meeting at Marsden on Tuesday 25 May. Both had been available to join their fellow principals who came to our meeting on 11 May.

Both have been our Club previously and are long serving principals. Tania reminded us she had been to our Club on five previous occasions to talk about school activities and to be a recipient of our schools grant. They are going great guns with their garden table project where years 5 and 6 students grow vegetables and sell at the school. They have developed a new strategy plan with a focus on place, people and practice and their playground project, Sandlab, is a current focus activity needing funding support. The school is quite small in comparison with the larger primaries around us, only 80 children, many come to the school from some distance away . The parents are close friends in the school, and there are a number of Asian and Indian migrants to New Zealand. The students are being encouraged to tell their stories about what they are learning.

Mary-Angela, hails from a Rotary family in Invercargill. At St Teresas they have a particular focus on Aotearoa New Zealand history, trialling new curriculum guides tracking our early history in New Zealand and history locally in Karori. Staff are increasingly learning Te Reo  Māori  and together with other catholic schools in the Wellington area Māori language is a big topic of learning.  The Covid shut down last year made it all the more important to bring communities and families together, to support each other and take part in events. Money from grants is going towards new history texts and replacing old stocks of books at the school.