Principals Message

Good afternoon everyone.  

A reminder to all families regarding holidays taken during school time.  Whilst we understand many families are opting to take holidays during the school term, it is an expectation that children attend school everyday.

We do require ALL families to fill out a Holiday Request form BEFORE holidays are taken to comply with our expected legal obligations.  All absences have an effect on our attendance data, which does not look favourably on our schools overall attendance audit. 

Below is our policy and our legal requirment to account for extended absences (as is in our newsletter every week and in our Information Handbook).

Family Holidays

Victorian Government regulations state that you must request to take holidays during term time.  Please view the link below for for more information:

 http://www.education.vic.gov.au/school/parents/behaviour/Pages/attendance.aspx 

 To this end, St Laurence O'Toole Primary School requires that a Holiday Request Form  must be completed prior to holidays that are taken during the school term. 

The Holiday Request Form is available by request from the Principal, Liz O'Loughlin, at principal@stlleongatha.catholic.edu.au  Once this has been filled in and emailed back to Liz,  an acceptance response form will be issued.  The acceptance response form will suggest some things that you can do during your holiday time that have an educational outcome - such as reading a map, taking photos and writing a sentence or two about exciting events as well as collecting and discussing items you have discovered during each day.

On the topic of absences, the school is accountable for all absences.  As such, we do require a reason for each absence on the day of the absence.  Protocol is that the office will need to make contact with you if this has not been done.    It is best practice to submit absences via PAM, however, there are numereous options available for letting the school know of absences.  It is time consuming for the school to follow up absences if these guidelines are not being followed.  Please remember, if you are phoning in the absence, select 'option 1' to leave a message, please state the reason.

We thank you for your continued support.

Kylie V will be out of the office all of next week, so the next newsletter after this one, will be published on Friday 27th June.  To ensure no messges are missed, send all email correspondance to office@stlleongatha.catholic.edu.au email address.  This email goes to both Michaela and Kylie.

POPE LEO

We welcome Pope Leo XIV.  

Have an enjoyable weekend.  See you all on Monday.