Principal News 

WEEK 3 - TERM 4

To subscribe to future Newsletters, please click here 

BRAVE CONVERSATIONS

Dear Families & Friends,

On Monday, all students wore a dash of ‘red’ to acknowledge Day for Daniel, Australia’s largest child safety event of its kind. The day was dedicated to educating our students about how to stay safe in physical and online environments and support students who may have experienced unsafe behaviours.  

At Sacred Heart we would like to see a future where all children and young people are provided with education, protection and support to be safe from abuse and risk of harm. We hope such days like Monday, coupled with our Respectful Relationships program, eLearning foci and Berry Street provide our students with the skills and confidence to ‘have brave conversations’ and recognise, react and report when they feel unsafe or need support. 

In addition, in the coming weeks our senior students will be revisiting some educational content and support in relation to the appropriate and safe use of social media and technology. This is a particularly important educational piece as we acknowledge many students now have mobile devices as they ready for secondary school. Please note  we will have Susan Mclean, the leading international expert in this cyber safety working with families and students in 2023. Refer to Child & Cyber Safety Page.

The Daniel Morcombe Foundation focus and use of resources provide our students and staff with personal child safety education resources/material to support children and young people to prevent abuse and promote lifelong health and wellbeing. 

What is Day for Daniel? 

Day for Daniel is Australia’s largest child safety education and awareness day. This national day of action advocates for safer communities for children and empowering them to Recognise, React and Report when they feel unsafe. 

In 2022, the theme for the day is brave conversations. We believe Day for Daniel is the perfect opportunity to start conversations around personal safety. The key child safety message on Day for Daniel encourages children to Recognise, React, and Report if they ever feel unsafe. Child safety education does not need to be scary or risk-focused, but should highlight topics such as recognising body clues, understanding body ownership, naming private body parts and identifying adults who can help if a child feels unsafe. Please be assured the information we shared was age and developmentally appropriate. 

We encourage families to check out the Daniel Morcombe Foundation’s Keeping Kids Safe Resources, a range of educational videos, activities, and other resources to help our children to ‘keep talking’. Using everyday opportunities to reinforce personal safety messages is a great strategy to ensure we keep communication open and demonstrate we are willing to talk about being safe. 

For children there are lots of things our bodies do to let us know we might not be safe. These are called body clues. It’s important we can recognise our body clues. Things like feeling sick in the tummy, our hands sweating, or our heart beating faster are all clues we might not be safe. If we ever find ourselves in an unsafe situation, we need to be able to react. This means to find a way, if possible, to become safe again such as saying ‘NO!’, running away or screaming ‘help’. Sometimes we even need to break a rule to become safe again. If we ever feel unsafe it is really important to report it to a safety helper. Keep telling an adult in your safety network until someone helps. 

After debriefing with staff on Monday afternoon, we are firmly committed to reinforcing the important safety message and empowerment of our students in our care. I sincerely congratulate our staff and families for creating the conditions for our students to feel safe and  ‘have brave conversations.’ 

One of the activities on the day was to draw a handprint to represent at least five people they could trust and reach out to if they felt unsafe. Not surprising, it was affirming to see family members and staff identified on these handprints. Another activity was to draw an outline of the body and identify the clues our body tells you when you feel uncomfortable and unsafe. Again, this was so worthwhile as many of the students were able to beautifully articulate how they felt during these times.  

Prep information Evening

On Tuesday evening we welcomed our beautiful 2023 families for the Prep information session. For some families this was their first official step into our wonderful community, and the evening provided a lovely opportunity for our staff to gently share (showcase) a snapshot of school life at Sacred Heart. Families were provided with a valuable insight into our wellbeing practices, evidence based teaching approaches and a sample of a typical day in Prep. A special call out to Tarn from the uniform shop for offering up her time and our uniform models, Rahni and Taj - they did a great job! 

We sincerely thank our outstanding Prep teacher Bronagh Maloney for leading this evening and Sarah Rafferty our impressive junior school leader for sharing our teaching and learning practices in P-2.  We also thank Mrs Pennington for supporting the families and highlighting her pivotal learning diversity role within the community. 

We simply cannot wait for our new preps to start their first orientation session next week; this is always an exciting time of transition within our community. It is worth noting that we have moved to a digital information handbook for families using the newsletter style platform as this enables the school to embed quick links to key communication platforms and the most current information for our new and prospective families. Many thanks to Karen for coordinating this smart user friendly approach.

New Digital Parent Handbook

Prep Orientation 2022

• Prep Information Evening – Tuesday 18th October 7pm – Yr.1/2RS (Enter via front office)
• Orientation Session #1 – Wednesday 26th October 9:15am - 10:15am
•  Orientation Session #2 – Wednesday 2nd November 9:15am - 11:00am
• Orientation Session #3 – Wednesday 9th November  9:15am - 11:30am 

Little Hearts Playgroup

Next Session -  4th November

Little Hearts Playgroup Sessions 

Term 4 at 10am, following assembly.

• 4th November
• 18th November
• 2nd December

This terrific initiative has been such a lovely connection piece and entry point for our families, and we look forward to building upon this in the coming months. Carol Mathias, one of our LSOs is an accomplished musician and has offered to do some music & songs for the next session. 

ART SHOW - 27th October 4pm-7pm

We look forward to welcoming our families to the upcoming Art Show this Thursday to showcase a selection of student work undertaken during Mrs Hyslop's amazing weekly lessons. We have the best and hardest working art teacher going around; certainly the best I've seen in 30+ years of education.  On that note, Mrs Hyslop  worked all holidays and every weekend to prepare the student work to be displayed in the Mary MacKillop Hall. An event not to be missed!

MORE NEW FURNITURE ON THE WAY

Over the holidays we received our first instalment of beautiful new furniture so generously funded by the P&F.  After expressing my sincere gratitude on behalf of the staff and students, and highlighting the significant transformation of their learning spaces, we are thrilled to acknowledge the P&F stepped up again and committed more funds to meet our next goal for a senior school furniture upgrade.  The calming and settling impact this furniture has had across our junior school has been extraordinary.   

Device Program 2023

In 2023, Yr.5&6 students will be provided with 1:1 chromebook access. Owned by the school, these devices will be kept at school and asigned to students. In time, the students will be provided with a contract/agreement of sorts to ensure these are used appropriately and well looked after i.e. if  damaged unnecessarily, families will need to pay for the repairs or replacement costs.  

An IT levy will remain in 2023, although this will vary slightly across our school depending upon the device management plan.  At this stage, we will be advising families to purchase a far more cost effective chromebook should a current iPad (Yr.1 - 4) be beyond repair. No iPads are required in Prep! More details will follow in the coming weeks. 

Please note, our new chromebook program will align significantly better with a Google platform and support the transition to a secondary notebook/laptop program e.g. typing skills and applications.

The Writing Revolution

As previously mentioned, we have a number of staff currently training in The Writing Revolution, another evidence-based approach to literacy. Whilst we had planned to ‘officially’ roll this out in 2023, our junior team simply couldn’t wait and have already started this term, such is their enthusiasm and the value they place in this approach in supporting their students with their writing skills. 

Socially Minded Students 

It was a privilege to sit in the middle school this week as Miss Levy beautifully led discussions with ‘all’ the 3-4 students. I was left in awe as she was able to elicit  such deep responses from the students using a range of thought provoking images and questions. This doesn’t just happen, and I congratulate Miss Levy and the 3/4 team (Ms Tench, Mrs Collins & Mrs Murphy) for creating a trusting and valued environment for the students to share and express their considered thoughts and opinions. 

It would be fair to say that we are raising some pretty ‘socially aware’ and awesome children at Sacred Heart. 

STAFFING NEWS

On behalf of all members of Sacred Heart community we sincerely wish Ms Kehoe and her partner Blair much love and many years of joy and happiness as they get married this Saturday. The students adore Ms Kehoe (soon to be Mrs Tucker) and had a beautiful surprise prepared on Thursday with a mock wedding before her BIG day.  Thanks teachers for supporting the students with this special celebration. 

Class 2023

Last week, all staff undertook annual review meetings (ARMs). This appraisal process was a wonderful opportunity to formally check-in with staff and discuss their professional growth, aspirations and influence. Staff are also required to share samples of student growth/success and identify students that may still require further consideration/support. I have been most affirmed by their knowledge of, and impact they have had on their students this year, reflected in their personal and academic growth. I sincerely thank the staff for their professionalism during this most review process and continue to be indebted for their efforts across all aspects of school life at Sacred Heart. We're in great hands! 

It is also that time of year again where we start to settle on plans for the following school year and staff intentions are confirmed. While we are extremely confident with our plans for 2023 and the alignment of the teaching staff with ‘straight’ grade levels, we will not be releasing these arrangements until later in the term as this can sometimes be subject to late changes. As families would be acutely aware, requests for various grade levels, groupings etc. must be put in writing to the principal and reasoning to be strictly based on educational grounds. To that end, we thank our families who acknowledge and trust the professional judgements of our team. 

On that note, I sincerely thank our families for the most positive feedback regarding the recent communication and transparency sent to Yr.2 families. 

SWIMMING PROGRAM

What a tremendous success our swimming program has been over the last fortnight. Our staff have been absolutely blown away by the students and manner in which they have embraced and adapted to this new program. Equally we have been so impressed by the staff and quality of the program offered at the new Danny Frawley Center. How lovely it has been to also receive feedback from the swimming staff commending our students on their behaviour throughout this fortnightly program. 

With many tired swimmers, we look forward to returning to a familiar program next week.

BUILDING GRANT 2023

As briefly touched upon late last term, we were notified verbally by MACS that Sacred Heart was successful with a grant submission to access additional funds to support a school funded building program likely to commence in mid to late 2023. At this stage we are unable to provide further information other than the intention is to refurbish (modernize) our current classrooms with joinery, carpets, technology infrastructure, wall fabrics, classroom entry points, make better use of the smaller rooms adjoining the classrooms currently partitioned by glass walls and maximize use of the spacious corridor spaces. Please note, while the architects have completed a master plan this will need to be revisited to accommodate our funding capacity. In addition, given the likely scope of the ‘refurbishment’ works, we do not expect classes to be displaced for extended periods i.e. we anticipate this will be staged accordingly to ensure minimal disruption.  

P&F NEWS

Annual Masquerade Ball 

26th November 

A must for all families, so lock in the date and start your planning for what is certain to a stunning and fun night in Term 4 for the inaugural Sacred Heart Masquerade Ball.  

MORE SCHOOL TOURS 

Keep spreading the good word families as we had yet more tours this week with prospective families. Your messaging and positive endorsements are clearly working and we cannot thank you enough for this support. 

#bestschoolinthebayside

Little Gems

Miss Maloney's Preps are kicking goals and I've certainly had a steady stream of students justifiably visit my office this week to proudly showcase their amazing writing growth. This is often a highlight of my week having our students drop by to celebrate their learning and achievements. 

Well done Rueben, Miesha, Annabelle, Magnus & Fraser.

Xavier and Morris were also very pretty proud of their achievements and even requested an additional sticker to wear on their polos. Love it! 

Miles and James' acrostic poem for Day for Daniel. And yes, the boys welcome a sticker even from the senior grade levels. 

Our Hooptime All Stars off to the State Championships. Super proud of  our senior girls (Bonnie, Scarlett, Eloise, Bella, Gia, Amy and Millie) and their coach Tim. 

Acknowledged last week at assembly for their efforts and initiative, we loved how Will and Spencer cleaned-up after the Big Sleep Out, and they weren't even part of that senior program. Thanks boys, another 1%er!

Key Dates and Reminders

 (Check Key Dates page for full listing)

• 27th October - Art Show 4pm - 7pm
• 28th October - School Closure - Berry Street Training
• 31st Oct &1st Nov - Melbourne Cup Long-weekend School Closure
• 7th, 8th & 9th Nov - 3/4T, 3/4L & 3/4CM Zoo Snooze
• 12th Nov - Prep family Mass 5pm
• 25th Nov - Legoland 
• 1st Dec - 1/2 Sleepover. (Year 2's to stay the night)
• 8th Dec Christmas play & Carols 
• 9th Dec - End of Year Mass
• 12th Dec - Moving Up Day
• 13th Dec - Yr.6 Big Day Out
• 14th Dec - Yr.6 Graduation
• 15th Dec - Students' Last Day
• 16th Dec - Staff Last Day

And finally...

Don't forget we do not have school on Friday as all staff will be continuing their Berry Street training onsite. We also have two more sessions scheduled in 2023 in order to complete our full accreditation. All closure dates have been finalised for next year and will be circulated shortly.  

Thanks again for your support and active promotion of our fabulous Sacred Heart school community,

Simon Collis

Principal