School House News

By Matthew Markham | Posted: Sunday December 9, 2018

There are some excited boys in the hostel this week with the holidays almost upon us.

For the juniors it has been a slow end to the year with junior exams having ended three weeks ago. It seems amazing that we are still open but yet some of the senior students have been home for nearly five weeks!

It has been a big year for School House with some significant personnel and routine changes. The development of the hostel facilities took a giant leap forward with the purchase of 17 Melrose St, as Director of Boarding accommodation and a car park for School House. Gaining consent to develop the front section as a car park has been problematic and time consuming. We are hoping though, to be able to turn soil in 2019. We are of course aware that the hostel itself is in need of some long overdue redevelopment work and when we get the car park over the line we can turn our attention to this. Des Smith has done a wonderful job in creating a stock drive to raise some capital to fund future development projects. If you would like to contribute to this, please contact Des at [email protected]

For the last weekend in the hostel we gave the boys a choice of what activity they wanted to do and they chose Leap. The boys really enjoyed it and it gave them an opportunity to burn off some energy before their last week of school. In the weekend we also had a large group of boys at a rowing regatta with some of them doing very well, especially the seniors, Thomas Ryan, Jack Webber, Hunter Walker and Henry Wilson. Henry in particular had an amazing regatta, improving considerable from last season. The weekend before last the hostel boys in the athletics team performed admirably in the New Zealand Secondary School Championships that were conveniently held in Dunedin.

Ryan Dey performed amazingly well at the recent Otago Long Course Swimming Championships, coming away with 3 bronze, 4 silver and 3 gold, as well as taking out the championship trophy for overall winner for his age group. It would be hard to find a more dedicated and committed young man and Ryan deserves every bit of success that comes his way.

Good luck to this year’s leavers, I wish you all the best for the future and I look forward to hearing about your exploits in the years to come. To everyone else, I hope you all have an enjoyable and safe Christmas and new year and I look forward to seeing you all back at the hostel in 2019.

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