Parents' Association Update

By OBHS Parents Association | Posted: Tuesday July 31, 2018

The Otago Boys' High School’s Parents' Association has been very busy during the past year fundraising through many various activities to benefit the boys here at the school, and we would like to give you an update of where the money is benefiting your boys.

Earlier in the year we purchased fifteen Chrome books for the use of our Syrian students. These have enabled the students to work on a variety of programmes – reading, spelling, listening, science and math vocabulary development in ESOL class as well as their other classes.

A new AED defibrillator was purchased for the school at a cost of $3000, because of an issue in battery supply with the current one.

We have recently undertaken our cheese rolls fundraiser and a huge thank you to everyone who supported us in this. The $3000 raised from this has been used to purchase a new traveller curtain for the auditorium.

The Under 15 Football team was given $500 to go towards their tour to Brisbane for the Kanga Cup and we were delighted to learn that they in fact won this tournament – well done boys!

$500 was also given at the end of last year to support the boys attending the National Secondary Schools' Athletics' Championship.

A request was made to the Association that tents were desperately needed for Mount Aspiring and for the use by boys undertaking their Duke of Edinburgh awards.  As a result sixteen tents were purchased at a cost of $8000 for this.

We were also delighted to be able to help the Technology Department towards the purchase of a new metal lathe at a cost of $7000.

We are delighted that over $26,000 has been able to go back into the school to support the students. Our aim when allocating funding is that it must benefit as many boys as possible and we believe that we have succeeded in doing this.

We would like to ask you to support our newest fundraiser which is our Otago Boys' High School umbrellas. These have arrived at the school and are available at the office at a cost of $35 each. These are robust, sturdy golf-style umbrellas and are just the thing for a wet session watching outside sport.

We have a very active and supportive committee but of course we are always looking for new members to join us. We generally meet in the library on the third Thursday of each month and are very good at keeping our meetings mostly to one hour in duration.

I resigned as Chair at the last Annual General meeting but as no one was willing to step into this role I have agreed to carry on until the end of the year. If anyone out there sees this as a role that they would like to undertake I would like to hear from you. I believe in succession planning and would dearly love to stay on the committee until my son Callum finishes at the end of 2019, but not in the role of Chair, so anyone willing to take over from me would have my support for the following year should you want or need it.

Caroline Officer (Chairperson)