Principals Report

Hello Sunshine Families, 

THANKYOU!

I want to sincerely thank our wonderful and supportive family community of Sunshine SDS for sharing the load of the Stop Work action on Tuesday. Your support in managing students to remain at home, helping our school to avoid an unsafe, understaffed environment – was greatly valued.

Over 70 Sunshine staff chose to unite and use their voice to Stop Work in protest for a new, fair and reasonable Victorian Government Schools Agreement – without pay.

About 40 staff attended work on Tuesday to run the school and support a very small number of students to experience a calm and engaging day.

I am grateful to all our Sunshine staff for their determination and efforts this week. 

INDIVIDUAL EDUCATION PLANS (IEP)

Your child’s IEP will be sent home before the end of term 1. The Individual Education Plan is a document that provides an account of the agreed goals the family and school create together during the SSG process. The IEP enables families to discuss social and personal learning priorities they wish the school to support in developing for their child.

Our teachers add academic learning goals in Literacy and Maths, based on evidence of a student's previous learning attainment. Our teachers make judgements on their students learning attainment using teacher judgement – 1:1 work with a student, observations of a student's skill, monitoring a student's progress using assessment Cross Checks.

It is important to note that the IEP contains only some of the learning goals and priorities that are taught over a year. And those goals may take much longer than a year to develop. Our student's ability to learn well hinges on several factors –time, repetition and exposure. This means in order for our students to attain skills they will remember and use, we provide lots and lots of repetition, engagement with skills presented in lots of different ways and breaking the learning down into smaller steps to practice.

Please talk with your child’s teacher if you have any wonderings about your child’s IEP and learning.

PICK-UP AND DROP OFF

This change continues to work well for our students and learning time. We are making small alterations as we go along because any change needs feedback to make sure the change works best!

One change is that our back gates (bus and parent drop off) will remain open until 9.30 each day to ensure families can still drop students off after 9am.

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE –  ENSURE STUDENT NAILS ARE CLIPPED – many of our students communicate with their bodies and scratching others is a common way of saying they are a little unhappy! While the school has invested in long arm guards for classrooms to protect staff from bites and scratches- our students are also being injured by long nails. Clipped short nails helps keep everyone safe!

Non parental pick-ups OR Family or Parent Holiday – a REMINDER

If families are taking extended holidays or as parents you are leaving students in the care of others – PLEASE LET THE SCHOOL KNOW. The school cannot legally hand your child over to a carer or Care worker- we must have permission from you as parents and also have the details of the care worker or family member.

CAR PARKING – FRONT OF SCHOOL

Please use parking spaces when DROPPING OFF OR COLLECTING STUDENTS  - parking ‘anywhere’ is unsafe and blocks other cars.

Remember my door is ALWAYS OPEN for a chat, share a worry or provide feedback!  

Wishing a Happy and safe weekend to all, 

Lisa