From the Assistant Principal

Koorie Morning Tea:

Last Friday morning, we had delicious baked goodies baked by a few of our outstanding Breakfast Club Volunteers while some of our community discussed how best to begin looking to build a Cultural Safe Space for our students and families who are Koorie.  While this process is centred around our Koorie families, this would be a space used by our whole school community to find safety and connection.  John Murray, our Koorie Education Support Officer (KESO), was on-site to provide experience and guidance as he has initiated this work across many schools since 2010 in Victoria.  This conversation was peppered with wonderful ideas and considerations and will be one of many upcoming conversations to progress this process.  If you are interested in being a part of this process, please reach out to me via email directly to be involved in future discussions.

School-Wide Positive Behaviour Support (SWPBS):

The past two weeks we have focused our attention on: Be Responsible.  This was very similar to our rollout of: Be Kind, with Values Recognition Slips, wellbeing lessons in classrooms, and a focus of what this looks like in our learning and playing spaces.  At Friday’s assembly, I only had time to read out a few slips, and yet this time it was calculated that we had clocked over 100 recognised acts of responsibility every hour over the fortnight, which was a massive achievement!  Some of the best of these recognitions were not always from teachers, but were from others in our SMPPS community, such as our library volunteers Jess and Hannah, our Education Support Staff, and our Student Representative Council, demonstrating that it takes a community to support our new school values.  We are excited to see how our Active Learning value infiltrates our campus over the next fortnight, and look forward to sharing this at our next assembly in week 8.

Parent Volunteers:

There are a few new parents out there wanting to volunteer to read or join excursions.  In order to Volunteer with us you will need: a Working with Children’s Check (which the office will take a copy and log), to have viewed our policies: Code of Conduct Policy, Student Safety and Wellbeing, and Volunteer Policy, (which are all available on our website), to have signed our Volunteer Confidentiality Agreement and given to the office (hard copies available in the office), have viewed the Child Safe Standards powerpoint, and to have viewed our Volunteer Induction Video for 2025. Please adjust your volume with this video as my videography skills are a growing skill, but the content is accurate. Additionally, this information has been sent through a Compass post on Monday, 1 September with all of the relevant documentation attached for easy reference. 

Breakfast Club:

Breakfast Club continue to support full bellies in the morning and would like you to note that there are gluten-free options.  If you are interested in a gluten-free option, please ask at the window. Additionally, food hampers are available for anyone who is need of extra to fill up the pantry at home, (vitabrits, long-life soups, rices, and milk, etc.), so please send me a direct email if you are interested.  Finally, we had another trolley of these items available at our last assembly free to parents/carers.

Cyber Safety:

I strongly encourage you to visit the website: https://cybersafetyproject.com/parents2025/ for parents/carers to navigate the realm of safe internet practices.  I think that the most eye-opening of the content is the insecurity around Roblox. Additionally, we are having students in our upper years accessing social media.  While the age restriction preventing kids under 16 from using social media doesn’t come into effect until December of this year, I strongly encourage you to practice cyber safety in your home:

1. Ensure all devices are only used in living spaces and keep them out of bedrooms and bathrooms.

2. Set a routine expectation that students put screens away at least 30 minutes (ideally more) prior to bed.

3. Keep the lines of communication open regularly with your child about what they’re playing and who they talk to online, so if they encounter an issue online, they are more likely to come to you to help them navigate the problems as they are used to discussing their screen time with you.

While this is a tricky space for us all to keep kids safe, the more you put in healthy practices now, the easier it is to have the kids adhere to these practices as they mature.

Social Stories:

Often, we have students who need front-loading with a change in their day-to-day routines to create more awareness and decrease anxiety around change.  For such events, we have social stories.  Social stories explain the change, and often have pictures to demonstrate what this change could look like.  The great aspect of a social story is that they are good teaching; they help create predictability and consistency for all students.  As a school we are building our resources for our repeated events, and often we share them whole class to prepare students for events, such as Athletics Day, Book Week Parade, etc.  This week teachers and ES will be front-loading students for planning week in week 8.  Planning week means that specialist classes (art, PE, STEM, etc.) happen all on the same day to facilitate teacher teams to meet and plan for the next term.  Our SMPPS social story bank is building, and we continue to look to decrease the Cognitive Load required by our students to interpret new situations to help facilitate smoother transitions across the school.

Happy Spring!

Sam Smrekar Thompson

Assistant Principal