Principal Tony Pope gives us a tour
Life isn’t all fun and games. We are here for professional purposes after all! We had our first school visit today. Last night, we had dinner with our school principals and I had a wonderful conversation about methods used to close the Maori achievement gap in schools.
A few notes on schools in New Zealand. Schools go from years 0-13, zero being kindergarten and 13 being a transition year and first year of a bachelor’s program. Primary is usually 0-6, intermediate 7-8 and secondary 9 -13. Schools are assigned a decile according to economic levels 1-10, 10 being the highest. I visited Selwyn Primary School, which has a decile level of 2 with 512 students. The school has a majority of Maori students with a much smaller number of pākēha (white) and Pasifika students.
When we arrived, we were greeted with a performance from the children. The boys even did a haka for us, which is a traditional Maori show of strength. All children - Maori and pākēha - really seemed to enjoy this. After a tour of the school, we attended a staff tea break which lasts for about 30 minutes. During this daily time, all staff, aside from the 4 on duty watching the children in the play areas, have tea and a brief 10 minute meeting. We were then free to observe any classes we wanted. I observed a bilingual Maori/English class.
There were a couple striking differences between New Zealand schools and Bel Air. Every school in New Zealand has a dental clinic. The children’s teeth are checked yearly and fillings/extractions are done right at school. Many children don’t come to school with shoes on. The principal said it is not an economic factor. We saw many on our visit with no shoes on – even running in PE. Don’t forget, it’s winter here. There is no school lunch program, but there is a national initiative to provide students with free fruit to eat. When I asked one child, “What do you like best about your school?”, he responded that he liked getting fruit every day. There are no school buses. Students either walk to school, or are dropped off by car. Many students give up their lunch time to work on special projects such as gardening or woodshop.
The children all wanted to know about Michael Jackson’s funeral and said they were most looking forward to field day where they could play sports all day. Reminders to us that there are still those similarities.
