Principal's News

Courage, Faith, Love

Dear Parents/Carers and Friends of St Agatha's Primary School,

Welcome to Term 3! It was wonderful to see the children's smiling faces as they came back to school on Tuesday.

On Monday, the staff were involved in a professional learning day to learn more about the Whole School Approach to Positive Behaviour that we have been implementing at St Agatha's over the past few years. We had a speaker from Lookout who spoke about how schools can support students who may live in Out of Home Care due to complex family situations. We also learned about the effects of trauma in children and adolescence as a result of abuse, neglect, disadvantage and other adverse family circumstances. Children and adolescents exposed to childhood trauma are more likely to experience poor academic performance, have difficulty forming friendships and have challenging classroom behaviours.

The rest of the day was spent revisiting our expectations of RESPECT, RESPONSIBILITY and SAFETY, as well as how we can ensure safe and predicable learning environments for all students. Teachers do this through building positive relationships with students, ensuring effective communicating, setting up the classrooms effectively, having predicable routines, and ensuring active supervision.

We will continue to build the knowledge and expertise of all staff so that they can best support the wellbeing of all students at our school. Please refer to the Wellbeing News page to see some excellent articles from Mr Butler.

A reminder that dogs should not be brought onto the school grounds. Unfortunately, one of our teachers has had to clean dog poo off the students' shoes! Thanks for your help with this.

I hope you have seen our beautiful prayer garden that was completed over the holidays. A big thank you to the parent community for making this possible by raising the funds for this special project.

I hope you all have a great weekend and look forward to seeing you next week.

Yours in faith

Michelle Bruitzman

Principal