Principal's Report

Welcome to all of our new and ongoing families to another exciting year of learning and community building at St. Joseph’s School! In these restricted times, I extend a virtual welcome via the text of this newsletter and pray deeply that we come out the other side of this pandemic sooner rather than later so that I may meet everyone face-to-face and without a mask!

Our strong team focus here at St. Joseph’s for 2022 is quite simple. As skilful helpful adults, we are committing our collective expertise, experience, and resources to work in strong teams to ensure that every child understands that these icons from the student support framework, Living Well, Learning Well, are meaningful -

Our strong staff teams have been working hard for 4 days since 27 January to prepare well-planned and targeted experiences that focus on the individual learning and wellbeing needs of our students. As I alluded to at the end of last year during the Presentation Assembly, the proud academic achievement of our Glen Innes children in 2021 against national benchmarks such as NAPLAN and PAT-Maths and PAT-Reading are very good, but we want to do even better in 2022. We want to aim for excellence! Our strong staff teams have already identified groups of students who will be targeted for extension work, as well as those groups of students who will continue to receive the right support to meet national benchmarks for their age. Similarly, we will be interrogating student satisfaction data and speaking with SRC representatives to ensure students have a clear voice in their learning at St. Joseph’s School.

Contemporary education research from Australian schools supports two crucial aspects of the partnership between schools and families. The first is no surprise - “come to school”! Regular and engaged attendance has a direct correlation between academic achievement and positive wellbeing. No matter the problem (COVID permitting!?), please send your child to school and we can work in partnership to enhance positive engagement with learning. The second aspect relates to the positive partnership between home and school. The document linked below explains it well under the Living Well, Learning Well headings and while looking quite complex, the essence is quite simple. A positive partnership is founded on positive language and positive practice. If we speak about each other positively, practice what we say by attending school community events like Parent Information evenings and Student Conferencing meetings, encouraging children to attend whole school events like Swimming Carnivals and Family Masses, our words and actions are then mirrored by our children. I get it that COVID is restricting us quite heavily at the moment, but be assured as soon as the shutters go up, we have great plans to open our doors and grow an even more positive family-school partnership that has a clear and unshakeable focus on learning growth and positive wellbeing for our students!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1acJYz2RB8qcBBoJ5Y4KMHiZWpgcoJ_gm/view?usp=sharing

This is just the beginning of our work together. We have much more to say and far more to do as we work together in partnership with our strong staff teams but for now trust us that we have a clear plan and the expertise, experience and resources to achieve great things at an already good school.

The remainder of this newsletter has a number of important details and instructions about such things as Opening School Mass, bell times, uniform expectations, swimming carnival, canteen orders, etc. etc. These are all important day-to-day actions that ensure calm and meaningful learning can take place. Please familiarise yourself with these expectations to support your child in having a calm and meaningful day.

I welcome our new staff to the school team. Kirsty Malby-Miller (Stage 3) and Ron Webel (Education Assistant) and welcome back Michelle Tarrant (Education Assistant). They grow and enhance our already strong staff teams at St. Joseph’s.

Finally, I congratulate the newly elected School Captains for 2022 - Patrick Wright and Allegra Pinferi.

In my conversations with Patrick and Allegra (on the phone due to basketball trials) this morning it is clear that they both enjoy the positive support of both their peers and the staff. Similarly, they have great aspirations for ongoing improvement in the community culture and happiness of this proud school. I look forward to sharing their ideas with you in future newsletters. I also highly commend the 8 remaining Year 6 students who nominated for election and delivered exceptional speeches yesterday. The quality of address made it difficult for the students and staff to vote for sure.

May God go with you.

Geoff McManus

Principal