A message from the Principal

As we move towards the end of another busy term, I am writing to seek the support of all of our community to do their bit to ensure SKiPPS is always a safe place for our students and families.

In recent weeks we have noticed an increase in issues around parking at school and also in the number of students unsupervised at school outside of school hours.

Whilst I will apologise in advance for the more negative tone in this week's newsletter, we would like to provide the following reminders;

Parking at SKiPPS

Since the access road and car park at the front of the school were remodelled by the Education Department a couple of years ago, traffic flow has improved and dangerous congestion has decreased at the peak times around the start and end of the school day.  

Whilst this is a good outcome, we do still require all of our families who use the car park at these times to display common-sense and show patience as the road is still narrow and the car park is still small.

If you are using the car park at these times;

• Please only ever park in the marked parking bays. Do not park on the footpath on the Bowls Club side as this blocks the footpath - forcing children onto the road and also blocks traffic flow and prevents other cars from passing safely. If you cannot find a marked, safe parking space please show patience, stay with your car and wait for a space to become free. Your child's teacher will stay with them until 3:45pm and then take them to the office so there is no need to act in an unsafe way & abandon your car on the footpath in order to make it into school for 3:30pm.

• Move slowly at these times and be aware of who is around you. There are a large number of children who walk home in this direction and it is always a possibility that they will forget their road-sense and run between vehicles. Please help us to avoid a potentially highly distressing accident.

• Remember that there is plenty of free parking on Hockey Drive, Village Green Drive and Lakeside Drive at these key times when you display a SKiPPS sticker on your windscreen. Often parking this little bit further away and avoiding the congestion of the car park actually saves time (and a huge amount of stress). Please drop into the school office to get your free sticker and further details of this arrangement with Parks Victoria.

• Never drive onto the school grounds (even if dropping off or picking up from Team Kids). Before and after school (and during the school day) our school grounds are used for basketball training, as a play space by Team Kids and for many other activities that will see children running around. To add to this, at dawn and dusk light and visibility are poor. We have seen a number of parents driving into the school grounds to drop-off and pick-up at these times, often at high speed as they assume the school is empty.  Please do not drive onto school grounds and use the car park instead.

Supervision at school

Our school staff provide supervision for students in the yard from 8:45am each morning and until 3:45pm each afternoon.

Outside of these times, children must not be on the school grounds without adult supervision. 

We have seen a recent increase in children being dropped off at school (often quite a long time) before 8:45am or staying behind after school to play basketball or otherwise use the school grounds without parents.

This creates a worrying safety issue as there would be no responsible or trained adults to help manage an accident, first aid issue or other incident. It is not the job of the Team Kids staff to provide 'passive supervision' of other children who are not part of their program and ratio calculations.

If you do need to have your children at school prior to 8:45am or to remain at school after 3:45pm then they must be booked into Team Kids as they will provide this appropriate supervision. https://www.teamkids.com.au/venues/st-kilda-park-primary-oshc-5/ 

For the sake of safety, we will need to start contacting parents directly if we notice that children are at school unsupervised outside of these times.

On a more positive note...

As we approach the final two weeks of this term, we have a huge number of activities, excursions, fundraisers and community events taking place before the upcoming school holidays.

We know that staying on top of what is happening can be very difficult so we have summarised these later in the newsletter in the 'Upcoming Events' page. Please take a few minutes to read over these and ensure you don't get caught out during the final fortnight of term 3!

Neil Scott

Principal