From the Head of Secondary 06.06.2020

Many thanks for your nominations for the Global Citizenship Award 2020. The deadline has now passed and this week the leadership team will be considering the nominations and making a final decision which be announced before the end of term. It will be difficult. We have many fantastic students who not only show the qualities that we expect of a global citizen on a day to day basis, they also go out of their way to demonstrate them, in a practical way, in and outside of school.

You may know that the Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme has been running successfully at KIS for many years and more recently, under the enthusiastic leadership of Ms McNutt and her team, it has developed hugely. We again have a list of students who have gained their Bronze and Silver Awards but this year, we have our first Gold Award Winner! This is a tremendous achievement for Kaori Weightman in Year 13.

Kaori was a direct silver entrant when she was in Year 11 and during Years 12 and 13 she has completed 52 weeks of service, skills, physical and participated in the Adventurous Journey which was the toughest ever completed. She also organised and participated in a residential project in Australia in the summer of 2018, directly after completing her Silver Award. All this alongside working assiduously on her A Levels!

We will hear more about Kaori’s achievement in future news, but for now we can all join in offering her our congratulations!

In this newsletter, read about how Tiggi Mornington-Sanford rescued 111 turtle eggs from a beach in Kudat and took them to the Turtle Sanctuary. I am sure that Tiggi will keep us all informed about the future progress on ‘her’ turtles. Well done Tiggi!

Mrs Margaret Renshaw

Deputy Principal

Head of Secondary

In the depth of the night a large green turtle rose up out of the waves of the South China Sea and like bees to honey she dragged herself up the moonlit beach to lay her ping-pong ball size eggs.

This was where she was born over twenty years ago and has miraculously survived against so many odds to return to lay her eggs as her mother did before her when she was born.

In the sea she is a graceful animal; on land she is cumbersome but determined to lay her eggs in safety. She hauls herself up the beach, making perfectly spaced indentations in the warm and wet sand.

She finds a secret place under the prickly beach cactus and digs a hole with her shovel-like flippers, straight down into the sand and as deep as the flipper itself, and lays her precious white eggs. She then flicks the sand back over the eggs to cover them from predators.

About an hour later she has successfully finished the task that we wish all female turtles can survive to fulfil to increase the rapidly decreasing turtle population. She drags herself back towards the ocean, leaving the reverse perfect imprint behind like tyre tracks in the sand.

At 6am, on our early morning beach walk, we found the tracks.

We called the Kudat District Turtle Association (KDTA) and with the help of Roland and his father carefully located the exact spot where the eggs had been laid. Roland gently dug out the hole and removed the eggs and put them in a bucket full of sand, being careful not to break or turn them. We had to relocate them to the turtle sanctuary immediately as they needed to stay at the same temperature as it was in the original nest. Roland dug a hole in a secure area and placed all 111 marble like eggs into the hole to incubate for the next 55 days.

It’s sad that we have to do this but it is for their own safety. It is shocking to believe that people still eat turtle eggs in 2020. The eggs that a turtle had laid two weeks before had all been dug up and sold locally for about RM2 per egg. This is an endangered species that we should be trying to protect and preserve and not kill and eliminate.

Let’s hope for a successful release!

I must thank Roland and his father for the amazing work they do for turtles in Kudat.