PRINCIPAL'S REPORT

Welcome back to school everyone! 

We hope you have had a fun-filled summer break with your family and friends. Thank you to parents, students and staff for being so organised and eager to kick off our 2022 school year. To our new Eastie families, we welcome you to our great school and look forward to getting to know you all and sharing in your child/rens educational journey. 

Of course, we also welcome back our existing families. It is great to see so many smiles and familiar faces about the school this week. Finally, we welcome some new staff to Echuca East, Caity Sim -  56D, Karina Bruffell - 34A, Jeff Millard - Indonesian, the return of Chelsea Tucker -  sharing with Sarah Williams in 34D and finally the return of Ben Hawthorn - Acting AP while I am in the Acting Principal position in Lyn’s absence. Please help make them feel welcome.

COVID-19 is still managing to cause havoc within our community and hopefully we can get on top of this very soon.  In the meantime, some restrictions are still in place:

• Parents/Carers are still unable to come into the school, but are able to do drop off and pick ups.
• Grade 3 – 6 students must wear their masks unless they are exempt. Please make sure your child/ren are bringing their own masks to school. We also encourage Prep-2 students to wear masks, but this is not mandatory.
• Rapid Antigen Tests (RAT) are available to all students for the first 4 weeks of this term. The first batch have either been collected or sent home with students this week. So please check that you have received the first packet. Although the RATs are voluntary for all primary school students and staff, it is recommended and we highly encourage, that you test your child/ren twice a week (ideally, Monday and Wednesday mornings). Remember any positive results must be reported to school. This is so the school can support families, record that students will be absent while in 7-day isolation and advise the rest of the school community that there has been a positive case onsite and they should monitor for symptoms.
• A reminder that if your child displays COVID symptoms, please keep them at home. Advice from the Health Department suggests that if you child displays COVID symptoms in the morning, but presents a negative RAT result, to keep them at home for the next couple of days as a precaution. The Health Department believes, if they do have COVID it is likely to show up in a RAT test after 48 hours of displaying symptoms.

On that note, stay safe and wishing you all a great weekend!