Principal's Report
Term 2 was, according to the calendar, one week longer than term 3. But, in many respects this term has felt longer than any other we have experienced. Certainly learning and life over the past 6 months has thrown us any number of challenges and it’s required all the persistence, resilience and mutual respect we can muster in order to keep on keeping on. I’ve had the privilege of seeing some of the learning that students have produced in the past month and have been blown away by how creative and brilliant their work has been. For many students, remote learning again this term has allowed them to thrive with the incredible support of their teachers and education support staff. A huge thanks to all our staff and parents/carers for working so collaboratively and so hard to provide these ongoing learning opportunities to our students.
I appreciate that for some students however, remote learning has been tough to engage with. They may be worried about how much they haven’t been able to achieve over the course of the past two terms and, whilst a return to school will be a welcome relief, it may also be daunting. I want to reassure you that when all students return to school on 12th October, our focus will be on connection, not correction. We want to ensure that every child and adult in our school community feels welcome and knows just how excited we are to have them back at school. That doesn’t mean that there’s excuses for misbehaviour or misguided decisions that impact other’s learning opportunities. But our focus will be on the physical and mental wellbeing of every person in our school community as we come back to seeing one another f2f next term. We will be providing more specific details on the various supports we will be putting in place for all students during the first week of term 4.
Over the past couple of weeks we ran our very first virtual parent / student / teacher conferences via the WebEx video conferencing platform. Thank you to those parents that have already emailed me with your positive feedback on the experience. A lot of work went into setting it all up and so I’m so pleased that it was well received by many parents and students that were able to access the conference sessions. I know with my parent hat on, I was very appreciative of the guidance that teachers were able to provide to our family for my daughter’s ongoing learning. We’d love to hear feedback (positive and otherwise) from as many parents as possible in regards to the conferences as this will help us decide the ways in which we might run these sessions into 2021. If you could spend 2 minutes filling in the survey link below, we’d be really appreciative:
https://forms.gle/ZGTZ1hoL5GfLzjth9
Also, for those parents that want to and haven’t yet requested on-site learning supervision for week 1 of term 4, the google form survey for this is unchanged.
I hope that you’re all able to take some time off during the school holidays and perhaps appreciate parts of regional Victoria as a family. Please stay COVID-safe as we enjoy the new freedoms that we have been granted by the government.
Kind Regards,
Dave Clift - Principal