The Hornsby Trust

Dear Friends and Supporters of St Andrew’s High School in Nuku’alofa

We arrived back from Tonga at the beginning of August, but have been tied up since then in
Christchurch helping Simon’s mother move into a new rest home and emptying her former home. We
are now home in Akaroa, and have the time to reflect on our visit to St Andrew’s High School last
month, and to bring you up to date with things there.

We hope that by now, some of you will have received letters and photos from the students whose fees
you have paid this year. We know that it has meant a great deal to them and to their families to have
your support. Some of them were thrilled to receive a photo from you! We described in our newsletter last month the damage which had been done to the school buildings, as well as mentioning that more than 70% of the students’ homes were badly damaged if not demolished by Cyclone Gita (picture below shows damage to the roof of a store-room.)

We were able to carry out some small-scale repairs ourselves, (picture below shows Rachel replacing broken louvre glass in a classroom, after cutting it to size herself!) but we were overjoyed when Jack Brinkman from Chartwell Co-operating Parish in Hamilton responded to our newsletter, offering to come over with a group of men from the parish to help with the work. They are due to arrive in Tonga around now, and will be there for two weeks. We are so grateful for their willingness to carry out this work. There has been a chronic shortage of builders available in Tonga to do repairs following the cyclone, as so
many of them are working in NZ where they are better paid. Your donations will augment money from the Tongan government to be used in buying materials to repair roofs, classroom doors, windows etc.

One of the Hamilton volunteers is a mechanic, and has promised to see what he can do with the school truck, as well as our ‘volunteer’ car, both of which have kept going on a wing and a prayer!

We were serenaded day and night throughout our month at St Andrew’s by the school band as they practised for the Interschool Brass Band Contest, which was held last week. All their hard work paid off. Having been moved  up to the A grade after last year’s medal-winning performances, they won three gold and one silver award for their four performances this year, and were moved into the “A plus” grade along with one other school band, which presumably means they are now one of the top two school brass bands in Tonga!  What a journey they have been on under Kaveinga Vaka these last few years! (Picture below shows Kaveinga and the band rehearsing in the school hall).

To see excerpts of their contest performances, please go to the Hornsby Trust Facebook page.

How the band has managed to reach these heights has been almost miraculous, as not only are there a lot of very young students in the band, but they are playing on old and worn-out instruments, some of which are in dire need of repair. We even discovered one poor little Year 7 boy trying to play his cornet without a mouthpiece (a problem since rectified)! 

The exciting news is that the band will tour NZ for three weeks next year, from late April, to raise funds to buy new instruments! They did this many years ago, before our time, and it is high time they did it again. We have offered to help with arrangements for their tour, and hope that you will be able to attend one of their performances. If you would be happy to billet a student or two, or could offer a large venue for a performance at no charge, we would love to hear from you!

In the meantime, Janet Jones from Waikanae (pictured below) is now at St Andrew’s and working with groups of Year 7 and 8 students, using her years of experience of ESOL work in Myanmar and Cambodia. She is there for six weeks, and the school is very fortunate to have her. Her students love her!

We were very pleased to hear from the principal, Mo’unga Maka, that St Andrew’s results in external exams have been steadily rising since 2013, with a slight dip in 2015 when the Education Ministry changed to recording only raw scores. The data also shows that St Andrew’s internal assessment standards are very accurate when compared with those of external assessors.