Assistant Principal's Message
Sue Gordon
Assistant Principal's Message
Thank you to everyone for your support of our two latest initiatives - reigniting nude food and no dogs in the school policy. In the essence of looking after our school environment and community members, it is great to already be seeing the response and impact to these two initiatives. Our school grounds are certainly looking cleaner and we have far less of a need to be running clean up working bees with our students during the school day.
Our Nude Food initiative includes a range of strategies to decrease (if not remove completely) rubbish being dropped and left in the yard.
The strategies include:
- No, or very few, wrappers coming to school in the students’ lunch boxes. Each class is counting how many completely nude food lunch boxes they have each day. The highest total/percentage is then being celebrated at our whole school assemblies each week
- Nude food lunch boxes may include food that has been unwrapped at home
- Wrappers not leaving the classrooms or going out into the yard unless absolutely necessary, e.g. for food that cannot be carried in one’s hands
- Students encouraged to eat those foods that cannot be unwrapped as snacks to be eaten at home instead of coming to school in the first place
- Students either eating in their classrooms before going out to break times or always sitting down until they have finished eating outside: Preps sitting down to eat in the Prep area; 1/2s and 3/4s sitting down and eating in the courtyard near the olive tree; 5/6s sitting down and eating near the Mod 10 and stage area
- Classes have implemented routines and storage strategies for lunch boxes as well, e.g. class tubs, return lunch boxes to school bags etc. This is resulting in fewer and fewer lunch boxes being left in the school yard across the day and before or after school.
The success with Nude Food is not possible without the support of the adults (for many families) who make the lunches in the mornings. Thank you to all of you for your support!
As you know from an earlier Compass alert, our new Dogs in School Policy went through a consultative process with our school community. It was determined that MPPS would not allow dogs on school grounds unless they are a trained service or care dog. Other dogs may be tethered 5 metres from school gates to enable clear access to the gates for families to enter and exit. This is to take into consideration any fears some members of our community have regarding dogs. We greatly appreciate the immediate response from our MPPS families with dogs. Thank you for your respectful understanding and support!!
Looking forward to seeing you around school.
Sue Gordon
Assistant Principal