Principal Team Editorial

 

From The Principal's Desk

On Tuesday we held our final Year 12 exam for 2020. With English being the first exam for most of Year 12 on the 10th of November, the completion of the Chinese Second Language exam on Tuesday brought a close to an extraordinary year for most of our final year students, who like their VCAL counterparts have had to adapt more than any Year 12 students in history, whilst also missing many of the key events that define the graduating class. Congratulations to all Year 12s who completed their exams over the last few weeks. It is now an anxious wait for many, before receiving their results at the end of December. I would like to thank Wendy Pearce and the senior school team in particular for their stewardship of this process over the last month.

Recently we have received the results from the 2020 Student Attitudes to School Survey (SASS). Unfortunately our results haven’t been very positive in the past few years and as a result our leaders and staff have been working incredibly hard to respond to the concerns that students have expressed. I was very excited and pleased when I poured over the data to discover significant improvements in every measure. This reinforces that the tireless efforts of our teachers to improve even further in 2020 is paying dividends and being noticed by our students. It also reinforces my belief that our staff did a commendable job supporting students and parents throughout remote learning. Moreover, our staff and parent survey data also includes many other pleasing results. Here is a quick summary of our SASS results:

Kevin Murphy 

Principal

Student School Records

Keeping school records up to date is vital to allow staff to get in contact with families reliably, particularly in an emergency situation. In January, all parents/guardians will be emailed a copy of each child’s enrolment records as currently recorded. We know many landline numbers are no longer in service, emergency contacts change over time and even asthma plans expire, so this is an opportunity to review and refresh your information. Each year, parents/guardians also have the opportunity to opt-out of permission to publish photographs in school publications – this can be done as part of the same information verification process.

Also, families will be pleased to know that the school phone system is now on the NBN, which has made it possible for our caller-ID to be turned on. No longer will calls show the ever-frustrating ‘Private Number’!! We encourage all parents/guardians to put the main school number in their phones so that calls from the school can be quickly identified. The number is (03) 9801 9700.

Please contact the General Office should you require additional assistance with these or any other school matter.

Peter Cameron

Business Manager

Orientation Day

Tuesday 8th December is the Year 7 2021 Orientation Day. 

To allow us to run a COVID safe Orientation Day for our new Year 7 students and to meet DET protocols, we are required to restrict our new Year 7 students from mixing with other groups of students. In order to facilitate this, all of our current Year 7-9 students will not be required at school on Tuesday 8th December.  Instead, they will have a learning from home catch up day. Students should use this day to catch up on any outstanding learning tasks that they have for their classes. There will be no online classes on this day.

Shane Kruger

Assistant Principal

Activities Week

In the last week of the year we will be running an activity based program.  Usually this would be a series of excursion based activities, however due to the pandemic restrictions we did not have the lead in time we need to set this up.  We will still be having a program and teachers are working feverishly to develop a program of fun activities for students to sign up for in the last week of term.  This year the program will be entirely free of charge.  Stay tuned for further information.

Catherine Ford

Assistant Principal