Dear School Community Members,

Education Week: Our school, along with many other schools, will celebrate education week next week. This is an opportunity for our community to celebrate the wonderful opportunities, experiences and achievements our students undertake on a daily basis at Manifold Heights Primary School. Our key events next week are:

Education Week launch at assembly: Monday, 13th May 9:05am
School Tours for Prospective Families: Tuesday, 14th May 9:30am and 12:00pm
Open afternoon for current families: Thursday, 16th May 2:30pm

We warmly encourage all families to join us at any of the activities throughout the week.

Racism: Mano has zero tolerance to racism.

Recently Mrs Geary, Mr Gibson and I attended a leadership forum aiming to celebrate the many and varied cultures within our school community, and educating our students on racism.

In Victoria in 2023, 17.5% of students reported they experienced racism.

Racism refers to a variety of practices, beliefs, social relations, and phenomena that work to reproduce a racial hierarchy and social structure that yield superiority, power, and privilege for some, and discrimination and oppression for others. It can take several forms, including interpersonal, institutional, systemic, structural, internalised, and ambient racial discrimination.

Manifold Heights Primary School has a zero tolerance to racism. Our process in responding to an experience of racism is:

Student or parent/guardian report racism to staff member
Member of leadership informed
Member of leadership respond promptly to student (victim) and parent/guardian
Contact Koorie Education Support Officer (KESO)
Prioritise time to meet with victim and perpetrator
Listen actively to victim and perpetrator
Act
Communicate openly and transparently
Check in regularly with victim

I encourage students and families to contact us promptly if you are aware of incidents of racism.

Mano has zero tolerance to racism!

Staff Professional Learning – Professional Learning Communities (PLCs): Professional Learning Communities is a key feature of the work our staff undertake weekly as we strive for ongoing improvement. Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) is an approach to school improvement where groups of teachers work collaboratively at the school level to improve student outcomes. PLCs focus on a specific aspect (crumb) of student learning that is guided by the interrogation of data.

I am pleased to report that our PLCs have set their focus (goal) for Term 2. Below is each PLC’s focus for Term 2:

Prep: developing student ability to hear and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words as identified from the most recent literacy assessment
Grade 1: specific letters and sounds as identified from the most recent literacy assessment
Grade 2: specific letters and sounds as identified from the most recent literacy assessment
Grade 3: specific letters and sounds as identified from the most recent literacy assessment
Grade 4: improving the ‘engagement’ of targeted students as identified from the PERMAH survey (wellbeing survey)
Grade 5: improving the ‘comprehension’ of targeted students as identified from the most recent literacy assessment
Grade 6: improving the reading ‘rate’ and ‘accuracy’ of targeted students as identified from the most recent literacy assessment
Specialists: improving the ‘engagement’ of all students in the ‘Connect’ phase of our Teaching and Learning Model

We look forward to sharing with you our progress with our PLCs as the year unfolds.

Active Travel to School – safety: It is fantastic that we have so many students who travel to school actively – walking, riding or scooting. With this in mind, it is essential that we promote and maximise safety so that students can continue to walk, ride or scoot to and from school. Recently we had a very close ‘shave’ where a student scooted across Minerva Road just after dismissal. I encourage families of students who travel to and from school on a bike or scooter to regularly remind them of the importance of always utilising the Crossings on Minerva Road and Strachan Avenue, and walking their bike or scooter across the road after looking both ways multiple times.

Mother’s Day: This Sunday is a wonderful day of the year when we acknowledge and thank our mums or special person for everything they do. I wish all mums in our community a very Happy Mother’s Day for Sunday. I hope you all get spoilt! Our Mother’s Day stall is being held today where our students are able to purchase special treasures for their mum or significant person in their life. Thank you to our wonderful group of helpers for providing this opportunity to our students.

Thank you for supporting our school and have a great week.

Christian Smith

Parents & Friends