Principal's Message

STUDENTS VS TEACHERS GAME

Last Wednesday the loud cheers and competitive spirit nearly reached as far as St Kilda because our 5/6 students savoured the moment when they got to compete against the teachers in a fast paced, nail biting match of netball. We can honestly say the match was tough and our teachers were really feeling the pressure, but with some great goal shooters we managed to convert and win the match. We want to thank our students for the fun afternoon and look forward to more matches in the future. Thank you to Susie Condron for umpiring and Ms Jo for organising the match.

FOUNDATION STEPPING UP

Last Thursday was the final day of our program. The 2019 Foundation children had the opportunity to meet their classroom teacher and special Year 5/6 buddy. The session ended with a sausage sizzle and all students received a lovely show bag of goodies to use over the holidays. The success of this program was largely due to the organisational efforts of our team leader Ms Lucy Clover, with support from her team and many staff throughout the school.  

WE NEED YOUR HELP

Our teachers are doing the best job possible always encouraging students to take responsibility for their belongings and become increasingly organised in managing their school day and classroom routines. Unfortunately no matter what we attempt to do, our students are frequently leaving their lunchboxes, containers, toys and jumpers in the school yard. Our Year 6 students are constantly collecting items from the yard and lost property is always piling up. It has become far too excessive for even our students to manage.

If we work together on this, we could potentially start to make an impact. We kindly request parents hold this conversation with their children and stress the importance of returning items to their bags.  Alongside this issue, we have noticed that a large number of students are using the toilets inappropriately, blocking toilets with food scraps, throwing wet paper on the ceiling and graffiti. The costs of repairs and our cleaner’s complaints are not something we want to see continue. This is not the behaviour we expect of our students and we hope a further discussion at home will be supportive, before we take some very serious actions on these matters.

HOUSE MUSIC COMPETITION

Our House Captains are preparing their teams (Furneaux, Loch, Carrington & Orrong) for the annual House Competitions. Captains have prepared a special music compilation whether dance or song and will have a dance off in the Barrbunin. All parents are invited to attend on Friday 14th December at 2:30pm. 

STUDENT LEADERSHIP

Leadership is about the art of motivating, influencing and supporting people so that they work together to achieve the goals of a team. It’s important for all students to experience leadership opportunities during their schooling, to learn the art of building relationships within teams, defining identities and achieving tasks effectively. It also provides an opportunity to learn to identify and display effective communication and interpersonal skills.

Leadership begins with identifying and understanding our school values. Our values are our fundamental beliefs – those principles we consider to be worthwhile and desirable. At Ripponlea, we believe all members of our community should be capable of exercising leadership in different contexts. The more leadership is encouraged, the more it flourishes.

Our students are preparing to apply for a number of leadership opportunities across the school for 2019. These roles include membership on Student Council, House Captains and School Captains. Ms Jo Ritson, Ms Zoe Keystone, Mrs. Rose and our current school captains Annie & Audrey will be part of the interview process and our staff and students will have a chance to hear from our prospective leaders and cast their preferential vote. The RPS student leadership model will be redeveloped in 2019 with greater student input and increased roles within the whole student leadership team. 

CLASS PLACEMENTS

The task of allocating students to classes takes considerable time, carefully informed decisions, knowledge of each student, collective teacher input and organisation. Teachers take account of many factors and look at what’s in the best educational and social/emotional interest of each student. It is about getting the balance right and making the classes fair for all. Over the course of last month, we have also received parental input into this process and value this in supporting our decision making. We would like to stress that requests for teachers cannot be accommodated at any point in time and sometimes it’s difficult to meet all requests. Given the thorough process we have undertaken, there will be no changes made after the classes are announced. We have uncovered a range of issues moving into this year, where students were moved around at the last minute. The distress caused to other students and families is something we do not wish to repeat.

We are committed to:

• Using informed professional judgement when deciding class placements; and
• Considering all available information, to assist the process.

We encourage Parent and Carer commitment by:

• Supporting and accepting decisions made by the School; and
• Being positive with their child about the class placement decision that has been made.

On Thursday 20th December all students will meet their peers and teachers for 2019. We will send a notification via COMPASS for any family who might be on holidays. Sometimes families do want to know which other students are in each class. We do not want to cause offence by saying no as there are a number of safety privacy protocols in releasing this information. We appreciate your support and understanding on all these matters. 

2019 STAFFING ARRANGEMENTS

Over the last few weeks we have been extremely busy in the midst of recruitment processes that take considerable time. We do appreciate that families want to know which staff will move into which class and which staff will potentially not be with us in 2019. Over the year we have had a number of staffing changes and most schools can experience this with staff taking opportunities to step out from their schools and experience something new. As I mentioned in the last newsletter this can be perceived negatively by our community members, but each situation can be quite different for each staff member.

We would like to congratulate Ms Jacqueline Barrow who has secured a position at Bayles Regional Primary School. Jacqueline and her partner are moving from their family homes to an exciting start in their lives, as they commence building their new home in Drouin and establish themselves in a new community. We wish Ms Barrow all the success in her new role and thank her for her contributions this year at RPS.

We also congratulate Ms Alex Beamont, who only joined us recently as our Performing Arts teacher. Ms Alex has been a wonderful addition to our specialist team and we thank for re-invigorating our program with Live Lunch Concerts, choir performances and a range of other opportunities for our students. Ms Beamont has been seeking a more fulltime position and will be moving to start her teaching career at Brighton Grammar.

Ms Elyssa Agnoletti has been at RPS for the last five years and has been commuting for over an hour each morning to be a part of this community. This can take its toll on any teacher given the hours we all work and the daily commutes. Ms Agnoletti has decided to look for a position closer to home and have some quality of life as a newly married couple. Ms Agnoletti will be moving to Bell Primary School in 2019. We are not saying goodbye just yet to her as she steps out for one year. We wish her all the very best in her new role.

Whilst it is sad to see some of our teachers leave, we also welcome back the return of Ms Kate Ashforth, who has been living the expat life in Thailand. Ms Kate was our 1/2 classroom teacher and returns to this position in 2019. Joining the team, we have a new staff member by the name of Ms Luca Dickinson. Ms Dickinson has been a familiar face at the school earlier in the year when she was one of our casual relief staff. Ms Dickinson recently moved from Warrnambool and is currently working at Cornish College. Ms Dickinson will be joining us in the last week of the term, getting to know all of our students and our community. 

‘TIS THE SEASON TO BE GIVING

Whether we are observing Hanukkah or Christmas or just planning for the end-of-year holidays, we are aware that December is a time when families in need can find it difficult to make ends meet to share gifts and enjoy food with loved ones.

We would like to invite RPS families to donate gifts and food to our Giving Tree so that we can pass these onto the Salvation Army to distribute to those in need of some cheer this festive season. The Salvos provide food hampers and gifts to bring hope to these families and they need our help filling them.

Gifts can be left at the office and food can be left in the alcove between the main office and the Principal/AP’s office. Please donate by Wednesday 19 December.

• Further ideas and advice can be found below these general guidelines for donations.
• Please do not wrap gifts. Feel free to include some wrapping paper or a gift bag.
• Please only donate new items.
• Consider gift vouchers!
• Please consider older age groups (teenagers and parents) when purchasing gifts.
• Please ensure food items have long expiry dates and are non-perishable.
• Supermarket Gift Vouchers make a great addition to food hampers, allowing the recipient to purchase fresh fruit, vegetables and meat at Christmas.
• Consider providing choices that suit families with young children, people with allergies, the elderly or newcomers to Australia.

LAUNCHING SOON... THE RIPPER ZINE

Four extremely enterprising and enthusiastic students – Billie G, Eve G, Nina J and Phoebe K – approached us earlier this year with the fabulous idea of a student magazine. Without any incentive but to give back to our wonderful school community, these budding young writers have developed and are about to publish Issue #1 of The Ripper Zine. Keep an eye out for its launch very soon!

PARENTS AND FRIENDS OF RPS – WE WANT YOU

…to join us for Morning Tea at 10.30am on Monday 17 December in the Barrbunin to say a big Ripponlea thank-you to the help you’ve given to us this year whether it’s been:

• as a class rep;
• a classroom helper;
• assisting on excursions, swimming, sports, etc.;
• flipping a sausage or two;
• baking a cake;
• planting vegetables;
• contacting library books;
• manning a stall at the fete or market;
• shovelling tanbark;
• contributing to committees and events; or
• so many other things we could mention but we still wouldn’t scratch the surface!

Please do come and enjoy a cuppa and a treat with our very grateful staff; we are so appreciative of all that you do!

A YEAR IN REVIEW – FROM THE PRINCIPAL

Following a rigorous school review process in 2017, the school was positively positioned to undertake the first year of implementation of our Strategic Plan, outlining significant goals and targets within the Annual Implementation Plan.

2018 was a very significant year for our staff in particular, as they embraced new learning opportunities through extensive professional development, new roles of responsibility, new staffing structures, new curriculum initiatives, newly formed teams, newly appointed and developed leadership structures and roles though PLT’s (Professional Learning Teams) and sub school structures, including a newly formed School Improvement Team – Leadership Team. 

Within a very short period of time the foundations were laid for what was an ambitious year ahead, but the collective commitment of working together was managed through increased levels of communication, transparency, consultation, co-learning, building knowledge of the unknown, building trust, building relationships, care, support and respect for each other, purpose (our students), collective input into decision making, increased accountabilities, challenges and, most importantly, lifting the morale of the whole school.  We thank them for their commitment and support and acknowledge their hard work and professionalism this year – they truly modelled to our students the epitome of a “Growth Mindset”.

Our school demonstrated a very strong commitment to professional learning this year through a robust and extensive program. This has included working with external consultants such as Jenny Mackay on positive behaviour management strategies, Greg Mitchell on differentiating the learning for all students and James Pinnuck on high impact teaching strategies. We have also conducted many in-house sessions run by our leadership team. All staff were introduced to a new approach in the teaching and assessment of writing. VCOP language and tools have permeated our teaching practices and classrooms. Individual staff have accessed high level Bastow leadership courses and the whole leadership team has been coached on Instructional Leadership through the highly intensive Professional Learning Communities initiative.  

Our students were once again challenged by the changes they witnessed, with our increased expectations of behaviour, learning and undoing what was considered past practices. Trust from our students wasn’t going to come so easy and student-teacher relationships underpinned what was going to happen at each point. We put the values of the school at the forefront of our discussions and openly admitted that continual change was needed in our thinking and management techniques. The perception of our students and families around bullying continues to need education as well as development of a whole school approach to managing learning and behaviour.

Framing expectations in a proactive, positive and restorative approach will continue to be the focus in 2019, but even more so, the launch of the School Wide Positive Behaviour Support framework will build a culture within the whole school that will serve as a foundation for both social and academic success. We will be emphasizing early identification and prevention of problem behaviour, directly teaching appropriate social skills to all students, and modifying or rearranging the school context when necessary to prevent problem behaviour, using a three-tiered continuum of behaviour support practices in order to prevent problem behaviour, and actively using data for decision-making. SWPBS will focus on achieving social and academic achievement outcomes by establishing data, systems, and practices. All students will receive the support they need for success based on a continuum of need and intensity.

With so much happening at once, we knew we had to communicate with our community, give them as much information as possible, but not overwhelm. New communication systems were introduced or reactivated, confidence amongst our new staff slowly began to increase as they felt more at ease with all families. Our families stood by us as we invited them to come into our classrooms, volunteering, supporting our programs and our students. We thank them for their contributions on so many levels throughout the year.

Our School Council transformed with newly elected members and a new School Council president. So many changes once again, but their commitment was unwavering and their support undeniable. The work of our committees, from policy development, financial monitoring, marketing the school, incredible community events and fundraising, to consultation and community partnerships – the list was endless of what was accomplished in one year alone.

Along the way even our school facilities and environment changed, as we continually strived to make our school buildings, facilities, playgrounds and school environment the best for our students. Even our learning spaces started to become true learning communities, where students were engaged, motivated, challenged at their point of need and collaborated with each other. 

This year it has been frequently commented on by students, parents and staff that we have a renewed sense of optimism and positivity around the future direction of our school. As I reflect on the year, I am very proud of what our whole school community has achieved. I am also very excited about the future for Ripponlea Primary. Over the course of this year we have been able to make some key decisions and implement some new structures and curriculum initiatives that will enable and drive our future direction. I thank every member of this community for your support of me as the new incoming Principal.  

Until next fortnight!      

                                     Natalie Rose                                          Jess Grey

                                         Principal                              Acting Assistant Principal