Principal's News & Events

Term 1: Week 5-10! 

Term 1 has flown by and has been a busy and productive beginning to the year. I would like to sincerely thank our students, staff and families for their contribution to such a positive start.

School Improvement

We have made a strong start towards actioning the work outlined in this year's Annual Implementation Plan, already participating in Professional Learning Communities based upon key components of the Victorian Teaching and Learning Model 2.0 - specifically the element of Supported Application and the associated strategies of Re-visiting and Reviewing learning. 

Our teachers have also undertaken further learning in the space of Individual Education Plans, exploring the development of effective student goals and how to reflect adjustment recommendations from Allied Health reports in documentation. 

By April 30th the school will also have presented its Annual Report to Community to School Council for endorsement, which will then be published on our website for parent access. The Annual Report to the School Community provides families with a clear summary of our school’s performance over the past year. It outlines key information about student learning, wellbeing and engagement, as well as our progress against the goals in our School Strategic Plan and Annual Implementation Plan. The report also explains how resources are used to support student outcomes and highlights areas for celebration and ongoing improvement - allowing us to remain transparent and accountable to our school community.

Buildings and Grounds

As always, Grant - our Facilities Manager, has continued to ensure our physical environment is tidy, clean, atheistically pleasing, but above all - safe.  Over the holidays we have a range of works planned for, including: 

• New carpets to two of our Prep Classrooms - Prep A and Prep B
• New blinds to our Year 4 portable classrooms and 5A 
• Internal paintworks to our Year 4 portable classrooms and 5A 
• Removal and cleaning of one of our large shade sails in the Terry Lawless Playground, which was sadly vandalised using inappropriate language. The only way for us to effectively clean this, is by removing the whole shade cloth and having it industrially cleaned - sadly, an expensive exercise. 

Grant has continued to work with a group of students, coined 'Grant's Crew' to maintain the external school grounds. You can find an article about their projects this term, in the Wembley Magazine: 

Finally, our Wembley Waste Warriors have held their initial meetings for the year, and are in hot pursuit of refining our school bin systems - watch this space in Term 2. They also wanted to share the following: 

Finances

As we approach the final days of Term 1, we will also receive our confirmed Student Resource Package and overall budget for the year. This provides a more concrete basis from which to make informed staffing and resourcing decisions for the remainder of the school year - much of which is discussed at our Finance Sub-Committee meeting. As a school, we hope to see that our Tier 3 Disability Funding stream matches what we, at this stage, have been awarded through the DI profile processes we have so far undertaken. Having this accurately reflected in our SRP is critical in being able to further expand our Educational Staff Support Team and also influences our ability to provide consistent RTI support. 

Thank you to all members of our community who have managed to make a payment towards their child's education, by contributing to our parent payments levy. Such payments go directly towards improvements, such as the holiday works mentioned above, as well as everyday classroom essentials. 

Here's how we are tracking compared to this time last year: 

Community

School Council passed the addition of a Legionnaires Hat to our school uniform, in response to students finding the usual broad brimmed hats challenging to run in. The new broad-brimmed style hats are no longer allowed to have a draw-string under the chin, for safety reasons, meaning that many children are losing their hats when running. In turn, this leads to lots of students running with hats in their hands - not exactly SunSmart! 

We hope that the new addition provides a different option for our students, in particular our more active ones. We also hope that this is a well-received option for our Year 5/6 students who participate in Inter-school Sports and may find this a more functional item. At the time of publishing, we have made the request to Spartan School World, our uniform supplier, and hope to have this option live on the website by the start of Term 2. We are told that it usually takes between 3-4 weeks to complete new requests. As with our other hats, we will have a supply based at the school office for parents to purchase. 

Some happy news from within our community: a number of our staff commenced periods of Maternity Leave this term, some of whom have given permission for us to share the following congratulations with our broader community! Bella Clemmens and her partner, welcomed a baby girl - Penelope Kate - into the world on January 28th, whilst Kate Gialamatzis and her husband also welcomed a girl - Florence - on Wednesday 25th March. All of our staff who have embarked on Maternity Leave are doing well. 

Happy holidays and we look forward to welcoming you back on Monday April 20th. 

~ Katie McClue ~ 

Reminders