A message from the Principal

With this term being so busy, it is easy to forget that we are now less than 2 weeks away from the summer school holidays. At SKiPPS we will be packing an incredible amount into this last fortnight - graduations, farewells, final transition sessions, reports, excursions, assemblies, Italian Day, celebrations and reflections on a year of many highlights.

I encourage you to read the newsletter to stay up to date with so many things happening between now and the 19th December.

With the roof replacement works starting this week, all of this activity will be happening in amongst the safety fencing and scaffolding of a building site.

Even with this amount of activity happening, we are well into the planning for 2024. Earlier this week, our Leadership team met and drafted our 2024 Annual Implementation Plan - the document that acts as our 'playbook' for next year - highlighting the goals, actions, activities and targets that we will focus on next year.

Whilst we will share more detail at the start of next year, we are excited that this work will focus on building high-quality teacher practice in Writing (carrying on the great work that has happened this year), alongside a focus on building teacher capacity to understand and address student emotions and creating an inclusive school community that celebrates diversity.

With this final point in mind, we are already looking ahead to next year and excited to be be celebrating Harmony Day together as a school on Thursday March 21st.

Harmony Day celebrates the country’s cultural diversity. It coincides with the United Nations’ International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. It is a celebration of the message that 'everyone belongs' and reinforces the importance of inclusiveness to all Australians, 

As a school, we feel that the day fits perfectly with our school value of kindness and our ethos of including and accepting everyone.

On the day (and in the week leading up to March 21st), we will be celebrating in many ways. Classroom activities will stress the value of cultural diversity and we will find ways to celebrate the many different cultures of SKiPPS. We will have a whole-school assembly on the day and an open-afternoon across the school to invite families to share in this learning and to understand the diversity of our school community.

We are also planning to carry on the celebrations after school with a community event that will include food and drinks from around the world and entertainment that celebrates cultural diversity.

This is where we are looking for help from our community and we invite parents, carers and community members from different backgrounds to help us in the planning of the assembly, classroom activities and the after-school celebration.

• Perhaps you can share a practice or tradition from your culture with your child's class?

• Maybe you have a connection with a multi-cultural organisation, dance or musical group that could work with the school to perform or get our students involved in something new to them?

• Are you connected to a sports club that play a sport or game unfamiliar to SKiPPS students, could they get involved and share a sport from another culture?

If you think you could help us to make Harmony Day something really special that recognises and celebrates the different cultures at our school then we would love to hear from you. 

Please reach out to Mel Borella melanie.borella@education.vic.gov.au , Kara Barbuto karabarbuto@gmail.com or Brook Saunders brook.saunders@outlook.com and we will organise a meeting in the new year to plan things out in more detail.

Neil Scott

Principal