Martinborough School Update

From The Headmaster’s Desk – August 2024 

We have had quite the busy term. Lots of events on, and some marvellous results from the students.

Many thanks to Amanda Pickering and her wonderful team of helpers who organised the sporting

events. We had about 70 students representing the school at the Cluster Cross Country competition,

and have 15 students representing the Wairarapa at the regional event. The students have certainly put in a lot of work to ensure they are successful.

Sustainable Education

As part of wanting to reduce waste that goes into the landfill, the Middle Syndicate has implemented a recycling system in their classrooms. This consists of organic, paper and hard/soft plastic recycling. Some of the senior classes will start collecting their organic waste for the compost bin next term. This term Garden-to-Table sessions have been running in our year 5/6 classes. These sessions allow children to grow, harvest and share kai. It has been awesome to see tamariki develop their cooking skills as they prepare meals to share with their class from food that they have grown. We could not do this without our parent volunteers who help run the sessions. Thank you very much to those who have enabled this programme to run in our school.

School Beautification

You may have noticed some landscaping that has occurred around the school. Thanks to Ed Wilkie

and his band of merry helpers who have been working hard beautifying the school grounds with

some limestone pathways. It is a great initiative that helps protect the grassed areas, as well as

making it a little more aesthetically pleasing. There are plans in place to target other parts of the

school, beautifying our grounds, in line with the strategic plan.

Basketball win

Congratulations to the Year 8 Basketball Team – Joe Plumbley, Jonty Hewitt, Ben Herrick, Benjamin Guscott, Max Mason, Chase Kitto, Isaac Lam, who won the South Wairarapa Basketball Competition.

This is the first time Martinborough has taken home the trophy in many years. The strength of this

team was their ability to play as a team. They worked extremely well together, providing support

around the court. 

“This was consistently the best performing team in the 17 years the competition has been going” was the consensus from the competition organisers. Special thanks to coach Ted Plumbley for working with these lads, and to Harriet for all of the transporting of players.

Speech Competition

We have recently held the School Speech competition and extend congratulations to all of the students who presented their speeches. It is quite the skill, being able to present a speech in front of an audience. The Year 7 (Flinn Aring) and Year 8 (Ada Wilkie) winners presented their speeches at the South Wairarapa Speech competition. Ada Wilkie was selected to compete at the Wairarapa event, at which she gained a third placing. Congratulations Ada, this is a wonderful achievement.