URGENT ANNOUNCEMENT - School Closed: unless children of essential services

By Mary Healey | Posted: Monday March 23, 2020

With today’s announcement by Government, we are implementing with urgency our plan to support your child’s learning from home. We appreciate this is a sudden and significant change and will be heavily disruptive to many people in our community. For children of essential workers, we can make provision for them on Wednesday.

You may wish to check if you are considered an essential worker - https://covid19.govt.nz/government-actions/covid-19-alert-system/, however, those roles include doctors, nurses, ambulance drivers and police. We continue to ask that children who are not well, do not attend school. Should you be an essential worker requiring provision for your child at school on Wednesday, I would appreciate an email so that I have an indication of staffing that will be needed maryh@oamaruint.school.nz

For all other children, we will be supporting their learning from your home from Wednesday. We will outline this for you tomorrow afternoon.

If you need to have your child cared for by someone else, you will need to identify that person or people as part of your self-isolated group. This will need to be done by midnight Wednesday and the group must remain the same for the whole 4 week period. The caregiver’s own group (eg, their partner and children), your child and your own group (eg, your parents and other children) become one group. This group needs to be limited to minimise any risk of spread and should be no more than 20 people.

Your child will be looking to you for guidance about this decision. Parents, caregivers, whānau and teachers will have a particularly important part to play in reassuring children at this time. If you haven’t already done so, you may wish to read the information put together by the Ministry of Education to support your conversations with your children – Talking to children about COVID-19

As noted by the Prime Minister these restrictions are our best chance to slow the virus in New Zealand and to save lives. We all have a clear role here to slow the spread of COVID-19.

We will continue to communicate with you over the coming days. Thank you for your ongoing support of our school staff and school community.

Stay safe, be patient and know that we will be working to support you and your child during this Lockdown.