Lifesaving Compulsory for Year 9's at Rangi Ruru Girls' School
Monday 22 January 2018, 1:24PM
By RedPR
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With summer in full swing and the new school term not too far away, Rangi Ruru’s new Year 9’s will soon be getting into the pool to learn lifesaving skills, as part of their school day.
The Lifesaving Programme continues to achieve a high pass rate at both the Bronze Star and Bronze Medallion levels with Rangi being awarded the 2017 Bamford Trophy in recognition of the highest number of awards (participants) excluding Resuscitation and AquaSafe, in New Zealand.
Lesley Joyce who heads the lifesaving programme at Rangi Ruru, says the school has a long history of lifesaving, both winning awards and taking part in competitions.
“The skills our girls learn are both valuable and can be ‘life saving’, and it’s for this reason it’s compulsory for all year 9’s to take part,” she says. At this level they learn basic water safety and lifesaving skills (including Basic Resuscitation) leading to the Bronze Star award. Once completed they are encouraged to further their skills by training for and taking the higher awards such as Bronze Medallion, Bronze Cross, Award of Merit and Distinction.”
With recent news of a shortage of volunteer lifesavers on beaches around the country, Ms Joyce says encouraging young people to take up lifesaving is even more important.
“We are fortunate to have a school pool at Rangi Ruru and indeed it wasn’t until 2014/15 that the Royal Lifesaving Society (RLSS) saw an increase again in the number of awards being given out in Canterbury, with the earthquakes having damaged so many pools around the region,” she says.
Royal Lifesaving NZ said in their 2014/15 report that “pool space continues to be extremely challenging, making obtaining pool space to carry out lifesaving work difficult and until Christchurch has another couple of public pools reinstated, retuning lifesaving back to pre-earthquake numbers, especially in the junior awards scheme, will not be possible.”
At Rangi Ruru, the awards are advertised at the beginning of Terms 1 and 4 together with other summer sport options and training is generally held during lunchtimes in the school pool.
Of winning The Bamford Trophy late last year, Lesley Joyce says, “It’s a tremendous privilege and acknowledgement by the RLSS (Royal Lifesaving Society) of all the hard work that goes into running a Lifesaving programme such as ours.”