Principals' Update

Principal’s Update

Short Circuit Breaker Lockdown – Further 7 Days

We hope that this newsletter finds all of our CNPS Families safe and well.

As you would be aware, the Victorian Government has made announcements in relation to arrangements for schools in Victoria from and including Friday 4 June.

Based on advice from the Victorian Chief Health Officer, all schools in metropolitan Melbourne will continue with remote and flexible learning until Thursday 10 June. This includes our school.

Please do not hesitate to contact your child’s teacher or School Leadership if you require any additional support or advice during this period.

HART Awards

Tomorrow, Ben, Kim, and I will be attending the HART Awards online (Helping Achieve Reconciliation Together). Our School Council President, Sarah Bekessy will also be joining us as she has played a significant role in assisting the school with acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we learn at CNPS. She always worked closely with Ben in 2019 to develop a whole school science curriculum that resulted in the planting of our edible indigenous garden and the planting of the iconic local species in our bluestone gardens.

We are excited to share with the community that we are finalists in the schools and early years category for our Young Dark Emu Indigenous Garden and Learning Walk. We will let you know how we go at assembly tomorrow afternoon.

As finalists, we were asked to create a short introductory video about our indigenous gardens at CNPS. At very short notice Abbie, Abdullah, Ava, Cameron, and Zoe created a short video and this has been posted on Seesaw.

Remote and Flexible Learning Update

For the wellbeing of our school community, our teaching teams are trying very hard to provide a remote learning model for all students and their families. Whilst this model appears to be working for most families, we appreciate that it may not for some. We really hope that we will all be back onsite next Friday 11 June. As we expect that this lockdown is only for a short period, we encourage those families who are finding the remote learning difficult to only do what you can manage as a family. Please remember that we are also here for you and if you need any further support or advice, please do not hesitate to contact your child’s teacher or school leadership.

As we move into a second week of remote and flexible learning, we would like to take the opportunity to acknowledge our CNPS staff who are working exceptionally hard to provide a quality remote and flexible learning model for our students. Teaching remotely significantly increases our teachers’ workloads and our staff are faced with screen time on average from 8:30 am through to at least 4:30 pm each day as they plan for seesaw learning tasks, whole class, and focus group Zooms and comment on student work. In addition to this planning, they are meeting with their teams to plan together for the next week of learning and conducting many Zoom sessions throughout the day. Our Education Support staff are also working extremely hard to support our students with additional needs, continuing our intervention programs with students online and assisting our teachers with onsite supervision.

Many of our staff are also trying to support our own children with their remote learning from home and from a distance while providing supervision to those students onsite.

Today we held a meeting with all staff to discuss remote learning moving forward for another week. We also acknowledged that remote learning does differ between year levels to accommodate the abilities and needs of our students.

Please see an outline of Zoom expectations for students for each year level below:

Foundation

2 Whole Class Zoom sessions daily morning and afternoon (excluding Tuesday Specialist Day).
2 small focus groups Zoom sessions for each student over the 3 days of remote learning (please see Specialist Day Zoom sessions below).
4 Zoom sessions on Specialist Day 1 Zoom time per Specialist Teacher (STEM, Italian, PA, PE).

Year 1/2

2 Whole Class Zoom sessions daily morning and afternoon (excluding Tuesday Specialist Day).
2 small focus groups Zoom sessions for each student 3 days of remote learning (please see Specialist Day Zoom sessions below).
4 Zoom sessions on Specialist Day 1 Zoom time per Specialist Teacher (STEM, Italian, PA, PE).

Year 3/4

2 Whole Class Zoom sessions daily morning and afternoon (excluding Tuesday Specialist Day).
2 small focus groups Zoom sessions for each student 3 days of remote learning (please see Specialist Day Zoom sessions below).
4 Zoom sessions on Specialist Day 1 Zoom time per Specialist Teacher (STEM, Italian, PA, PE).

Year 5/6

2 Whole Class Zoom sessions daily morning and afternoon (excluding *Wednesday Specialist Day) *note change of day.
3 small focus group Zoom sessions for each student 3 days of remote learning (please see Specialist Day Zoom sessions below).
4 Zoom sessions on Specialist Day 1 Zoom time per Specialist Teacher (STEM, Italian, PA, PE).

As we prioritise Zoom sessions for students, teachers will reduce the amount of written feedback they are providing on Seesaw. Feedback to students will be provided during the Zoom sessions.

Accessing Onsite Supervision for Essential Service Workers

The criteria for students who can attend on-site is as follows:

Children whose parents are considered essential workers as listed, cannot work from home and where no other supervision arrangements can be made
Vulnerable children, including children in out-of-home care, children deemed by Child Protection and/or Family Services to be at risk of harm and children identified by the school as vulnerable (including via referral from a family violence agency, homelessness or youth justice service or mental health or other health service).

We are asking all families wishing to access onsite supervision next week to please complete this onsite supervision application form and provide confirmation that you are an essential service worker required to attend work. Please complete this form today so that we can develop the onsite supervision form today and teachers can notify their classes when they will be onsite and less available online.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfeGrpS_fG3ca4-OO1uPBWWyEayF8p_LmL574zkbwmkVt7jGw/viewform

Reminder for our CNPS Parents and Carers to Monitor Appropriate Zoom Behaviour and Seesaw Posts

This is a friendly reminder that our students should be attending Zoom sessions in an appropriate room in their house such as a lounge room or study. In a normal non-lockdown environment, it is not appropriate for our students to be taking photos or videos of themselves in their bedroom or a bathroom. We also request that our students dress in clothing that would be appropriate for school. Pyjamas are OK, however, we are seeing some students not fully clothed when on Zoom. This can make the other children and teachers feel uncomfortable and again we would never want any of our students to be posting images of themselves online partially dressed in any circumstance.

If your child is unable to Zoom from a common living space and the only option is their bedroom, we ask that they please keep their camera off during Zoom. This request also applies if they are partially clothed.

Thank you to our families for your ongoing understanding and support as we aim to continue to reinforce cybersafe behaviours during this remote learning period.

Teacher Professional Practice Days (PPDs) and Staff Professional Learning

All professional practice days and professional learning scheduled for next week have been postponed.

The Principal Team

Rachel Corben, Erin Brown & Jane Bilby