Principal's Report

In this week’s newsletter:

Appreciations 

• Thanks to the Environment Team

News

• JSC Education Week activity
• Attitudes to School Survey
• Student Learning Conferences
• Construction news

Coming Up - Tomorrow

• Interschool Sport
• Assembly tomorrow

Coming Up - Next Week

• School Council meets on Monday
• Brooke’s final day

Please be mindful that sending children to school who are showing symptoms of cold and flu increases the spread of respiratory illnesses across our school community.  This has a serious effect on staffing availability, as if staff contract Covid they are still required to isolate for 5 days. If your child is ill, please keep them home until they are no longer symptomatic.

Appreciations

Thanks to the Environment Team 

Recently the team has been promoting the recycling of old textas and this has been a great success. Co-convener Michelle provided the following picture indicating in a bar graph just how many kilograms of redundant pens have been recycled so far. It is uplifting when great ideas are supported by our community.

News

Junior School Council 

JSC celebrated our (delayed) Education Week on Wednesday with a scavenger hunt to look for flags of many nations that were hidden in the school grounds. This proved very successful with students of all ages joining in. It also beautifully matched this year’s Education Week theme - Celebration of Cultures. A big thanks to our JSC conveners, Lee and Laura, all the enthusiastic members of JSC who helped set up the scavenger hunt and the students who enthusiastically joined in.

Attitudes to School Survey 

The annual Attitudes to School survey has been completed. Each year all students in grades 4, 5 and 6 have the opportunity to provide confidential feedback in this comprehensive survey. The aggregated results allow school leaders to consider how we are meeting our students' expectations by comparison against all government and similar schools. Thanks to wellbeing team members, Carolyn, Lisa and Towela for administering the survey alongside the classroom teachers.

Student Learning Conferences 

All grades (with the exception of PBD and 6ML) will be holding their end of semester Student Learning Conferences Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday after school during the final 2 weeks of term. Bookings may be made via the pinned Compass post. Parents and carers will have access to their children’s semester 1 student report on Friday of next week. Reports may be downloaded from the Compass post that will be sent on that day.

Construction Update

We are very much enjoying the rapid construction of our new BIG building. I took some pics from our fortnightly site visit - the first in which I was able to stand within the huge space.

Coming Up - Tomorrow

Interschool Sport  

The grade 6 team will be very keen to again play an opposition team, with St Bernadette’s being the next opponent.  The game will be played as an away fixture.

Assembly 

We had only our second inside assembly last week and will again make a decision about the merits of indoors or outdoors during the day on Friday. We look forward to the grade 2 assembly presentations starting with 2BG and of course the presentation of our Pupil of the Week awards.

Coming Up - Next Week

School Council 

Council will meet for an onsite meeting on Monday. We will be hosting Footscray High School Principal, Jill English and Barkly Street Campus Principal, John Box who will be sharing their current school plans with Council.  

Farewell Brooke 

Friday of next week will be Brooke Danaher’s final day of teaching PBD prior to going on family leave to start her family. All who have worked with, been taught by, or have had their children taught by Brooke, will appreciate what a wonderful teacher and person she is. We know she will make a wonderful mum. Staff will wish Brooke all the best at a staff morning tea next Friday.

Warm regards,

Brendan

Reminders and Repeated Messages