Principal's Report

Dear parents,

Earlier this week the Minister announced that from 8 November all NSW Public Schools schools will move to updated Level 3 settings that bring schools into line with what is allowed in the community.

The changes support a greater range of activities to go ahead and also allow fully vaccinated providers and visitors on school sites to support curriculum delivery, wellbeing programs and school operations. To keep students and staff safe, we will continue to maintain cohorting and our established COVID-safe layered measures at all times.

The Department of Education have this week installed a number of CO2 data loggers in random classrooms to calculate and measure airflow to ensure our classrooms are operating safely. This follows our airflow and ventilation audit and the installation or air purifiers in some recommended learning spaces.

Currently we do not have a crossing supervisor at Gilba Road. Mr Garry has taken a position at a school closer to home and will be sorely missed. The RMS are currently trying to find our school a replacement but have indicated that this may take some time. I would like to thank our parent community for your patience on and around the crossing, as we supervise our students safely coming to and from school each day.

Our teachers are working very hard to prepare semester 2 progress reports. These reports will be in a short format highlighting the learning our students have completed and the progress made during semester 2. They will be available for parents to access in Sentral from Wednesday 8 December.

Students in Years 3 to 6 are currently participating in the reading and numeracy Check-in Assessments. These assessments are a NSW Department of Education online reading and numeracy assessment available to support schools to assess and monitor student learning. They are diagnostic assessments to inform teaching and there will be no official parent and carer reports available.

I look forward to welcoming our new families to Girraween PS as we begin to plan for Kindergarten 2022. Orientation for our new Kindergarten students will take place in week 1, 2022. In the coming weeks our teachers will be conducting interviews to assist class placement, planning and organisation.

As we move closer to the end of the year more information will be made available regarding our annual events. Teachers are currently planning for presentation day assemblies, Community Language Showcase, Year 6 Farewell and Graduation. These events will operate under Covid safe guidelines and more information will be coming shortly.

Finally, I would like to wish all of our families celebrating today a happy Diwali!

Nigel McClifty

Rel. Principal