Newsletter, Week 2, Term 1, 2023

Principal's Report

Dear Parents & Carers,

Welcome to our first 2023 newsletter! After the complications of the last three years I’m very pleased to be able to say that this year has started exceptionally well. Everyone appears happy and settled and has transitioned back into school easily. 

As you know, school routine these days is busy and the first two weeks of this term have been no exception. In a short period of time we have managed to complete our annual staff induction, participate in some valuable professional learning on how to recontextualise our faith in a modern world, conduct primary meet & greet meetings, hold a secondary school parent information session, celebrate our beginning of year school mass and run swimming lessons for our Year 3-6 students! In the coming weeks we have Pancake Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, our Annual Swimming Carnival and school photos to look forward to.

Thank you to all the parents who joined us for mass, who booked appointments to chat with classroom and attended the secondary parent information session. We hope you enjoyed these events and spending time getting to know the staff who will be teaching your children. We are very happy to be able to offer these opportunities but please also remember that classroom teachers are always willing to meet with you at any time and can always be contacted via class dojo or school email.

We understand that from time to time you may have some questions or concerns that you need to discuss with us. To support you with this, included in this newsletter is a flow chart of the process you can follow if such a situation arises.

As mentioned above, the start of the year has been busy so for this reason you’ll find that our usual unit and specialist reports aren’t included in this edition. Our next newsletter will come out in two weeks time and include these. It’s also worth noting that our school assemblies will begin next Friday, along with our usual student of the week and SWPBS awards. We look forward to you joining us.

As you are all no doubt aware, often in schools circumstances change and this week we find ourselves having to make some changes to the allocation of our classroom teachers.  From the beginning of next week Chris Brouwers will be working four full days in year 3/4 while Sereima Waqalevu takes on a primary maths support role. Nicole Zappia and Jess Baldock will teach Chris' class for the fifth day and work in Kirstyn Pepping's class while she attends to her role in supporting our EAL students. We don’t imagine this will cause much, if any, disruption to our student's learning as all involved are long standing staff members, experienced teachers and well known to the students and wider school community. I’d like to say a sincere thank you to Chris, Kirstyn, Sereima, Nicole and Jess for their flexibility and willingness to adapt to the changing needs of our school. 

Kind regards,

Andrea Welsh

SWPBS

Thankyou to Irribiz and Manang Handyman for their continuous sponorship towards our SWPBS awards each week.

Australia Day Achievement Award

Congratulations to Ellena Panagiotopoulos who was awarded the Australia Day Achivement Award.

Ellena has been actively involved in our School's Student Representative Council and willingly participates in many community and school events. In class Ellena always applies herself to learning tasks and takes on feedback and sets an excellent example to her peers.

DIOCESE OF BALLARAT CATHOLIC EDUCATION LIMITED
Complaints Management Policy
Although we all do our best to ensure our school runs smoothly from time to time things happen that may concern you or you have questions about. In this instance we are always more than willing to work with you to resolve the situation. The flow chart below outlines the procedure to follow if you would like to raise a concern.

Lower Murray Water

Thank you to Lower Murray Water who generously provided all our Prep students with a Goodie bag that included a water bottle and ruler. 

Building Project Update

The builders have been busily working away over the past month.  This week they started working on our new sensory play area. We can't wait to see what the finished play area will look like.