PRINCIPAL'S MESSAGE

Fun Night Approaches

Family Fun Night is now less than three weeks away. Please place 26th March in your diary and come along to support our school. This is our main fundraiser for the year and is historically a celebration that involves current and past students, staff and parents. The organising team today took me through all the new additions, which included some great new games and some tasty treats. My favourites include the twisted potato sticks and the lucky duck challenge. 

Census Numbers

Last week on Friday 27 February schools were required to submit their census numbers for 2026. This information is used to allocate funding to principals for all the programs that we run in our school each year. Our business manager, Ms. Moritis and I completed budgets for this year on 725 students. Our enrolment figures at census were 728. This is an excellent outcome and will continue to allow us to provide the best in education for your children. 

Swim Team

We are really proud of the achievements of the 

Plenty Parklands swim team at the past two events.  Feedback from staff and parents in attendance have made us proud of their achievements in the pool and even prouder with how they are showing the school values during these events. Twelve of our students are through to the third-round competition (Northern Metropolitan Region finals) on Thursday 19 March. Any students that are successful at this event will compete at the State final. 

Breakfast Club

This morning we completed our second breakfast club event. In week one, free apples were distributed to children between 8:30-9:00am on Friday morning. Today the options for students were an apple and/or a carrot. This fully funded program will expand to include a range of breakfast options for students. This is an additional wellbeing support program in place at our school to benefit our students. A big thankyou to Ms. Mitrevski, Bu Ladd and Sienna from year 6 for distributing breakfast items this morning. 

Adding Numeracy Extension

With recent staffing additions, we are now in a position to begin our numeracy extension program. In 2026 we will be offering a ten-week program in our junior school, followed by a ten-week program in semester 2 for our upper school students. Students will be selected based on their academic results in number. If your child is chosen to participate in this extension program, you will be notified beforehand. We will have two staff facilitating the program, one of which will be me.

Staff Absences

Recently we have had some unexpected, medium term staff absences. These are unavoidable but part and parcel of dealing with a considerable staff of 80 employees. We do our best to cover these absences appropriately. Considering the staffing challenges in education in Victoria at the moment, we are confident that the people we put in place can continue a high level of education for your children. Thank you to parents of children in classes affected for your patience and support. 

Student Behaviour

I need to take this opportunity to clarify how we are currently handling instances of students choosing to not engage in learning in their classrooms. Where a student is diagnosed with a particular special need, we have highly trained educators that can put supports in place to assist these children. In other instances, when students are choosing not to follow directions or engage in their learning, it is then that we contact parents to support us. When students are hurting or disrupting the learning of other students and our strategies are not working, again we ask parents to visit and pick up their child. In most cases, parents and guardians are working with us to get the best possible outcome. 

Special Mention

During the first month of school, we have had another big clean up. Mr Surkitt and his team have gone through all of our storage spaces and done a spring clean (in summer). A special thank you to the Menillo family who have donated the use of two skips through Ben’s Waste management to assist in the process.

Have a great long weekend,

David Whewell | Principal