Avonside Girls' High School International

On Tuesday we celebrated our new 2025 Student leaders at our first assembly back.

Congratulations to everyone who has taken on a leadership role, we can't wait to see what you achieve in 2025 🎉

Last year our International Council wanted to support the education of an underprivileged young woman in Nepal.

This was supported by Pat Price, an Avonside Girls’ High teacher who is the founder and director of the Heartland Academy in Nepal and the Karuna Private Educational Trust, who works with Women for Change to provide college level education to a number of young women who currently do not have access to tertiary education. Pat went to Nepal during the year and met 13 year old Sonu who started at Heartland last year.

The International Council raised enough money to support Sonu through one year of her schooling and we hope to continue supporting her this year. We are proud of the International Council’s effort last year and hope this global connection between the two schools will continue.

Sarasa graduated this year after completing 5 years of study at Avonside Girls’ High. It was important to Sarasa and her family for her to stay connected to her Japanese culture so she joined the Takumi Japanese Drumming Group in Christchurch. She committed to weekly practices and performed at many local events. This year the group played at our school Cultural Assembly and it was a highlight of the event. Sarasa has returned to Japan and she will start university in 2025. We are sure she will be missed by her Takumi group.

We are sad to farewell our international students but sometimes we are lucky to see them again when we travel. I went to Japan this year and met some students from the year I started in the AGHS international department 11 years ago. The last photo was taken the year some of the girls were at AGHS. Two students who graduated a few years ago also joined us for the reunion. It was great to hear about the lives and their achievements.

Four of our German international students are staying over the summer break. They are all fortunate to be travelling around sometime in the break either on tours, with their host families or with their families from home who have come to visit them in NZ. Here are some of their Christmas Day photos. Happy holidays!

During the year we supported Kairos Food Rescue and their Food Store which is available for anyone in the community who is struggling for the basic necessities. We were proud of how our girls participated in our volunteer programme and how they managed this event and helped with organising local food bank packs for delivery.

Fuka and Yoona have been involved in various school music groups this year and they performed at the Canterbury Schools’ Chamber Music event, which was a wonderful event. We are very proud of their commitment throughout the year.

Another year is over and it’s an opportunity to look back on our year. We will start at the end when four of our girls graduated. Athena and Sarasa have been with us since year 9 and five years later they are leaving us, it was quite emotional. Sarasa is going to Uni in Japan and Athena will be coming back to study at Otago Uni in Dunedin. Hinari and Erii started in year 11 when our borders reopened mid 2022 after Covid. Sadly Erii had to leave before graduation but she is going to Uni in Rome and Hinari will study at Uni in Japan. It was lovely to have Hinari and Sarasa’s parents, Athena’s brother and host families there. We will miss them and wish them all much happiness and success with their future studies ❤️