It never ceases to amaze me, just how much happens in two weeks at ENPS! Another fantastic two weeks and so, so many wonderful things happening across our school!

We have had students last week and just yesterday competing in the district and then divisional swimming carnivals. What a fantastic achievement to represent our school! Congratulations to them all! A big well done to Josh H who is through to the Regional Carnival now next week in the individual Butterfly and Backstroke, and congratulations to our other competitors Gianne P, Georgia S, Nathan L, Mason S and Anton D for their impressive performance yesterday, although just missing out on the next stage.

We also had our school photos on Tuesday, and our website upgrade filming on Wednesday this week. Twelve students were selected for speaking roles and they all did an incredible job in front of the camera! We can’t wait to share the updated website with you in the coming weeks.

Staffing News

We are excited to announce that we have another two ENPS babies on the way! Congratulations to Josh D’Souza and his wife Bronte, who are expecting their baby girl in September. We are also thrilled to announce that Mina Stephens and Dylan will be expecting their second baby girl towards the end of August!

Professional Learning at ENPS

What you may not always realize is that behind the scenes our staff are continuously learning and developing professionally. Our staff meet each week on Tuesday and Wednesdays afterschool, and you may even find sometimes your child’s home group teacher is replaced by a Casual Relief Teacher (CRT) while they are participating in professional learning throughout the day.

On Wednesday afternoon we had just about all of our ENPS staff complete our First Aid and CPR practical training and assessment. Every three years we update our First Aid, Asthma and Anaphylaxis training, and every year we update our CPR accreditations.

At ENPS we make the decision to train as many staff as we can in First Aid. We don’t have to do this, as this is well above the Department of Education compliance requirements, however we value and prioritise this training to ensure the health, safety and wellbeing of our students, staff and community.

Over the coming weeks we will have a number of staff involved in the Department of Education’s Transforming the First Years of Teaching program. This is a wonderful program supporting teachers new to a career in education alongside their mentors. At ENPS it is important to us that our teachers are supported in their professional learning and growth.

Connecting Families to School

At ENPS, we really value our connection with families and actively strive to provide opportunities to connect parents and carers to their child’s classroom learning. We acknowledge and respect that every family is different and therefore it is important to us that we provide a variety of entry points and opportunities for all our families.

Community events like our VIP afternoon, Start of Year Picnic, parent helpers in the classroom or volunteers on excursions, are all ways we aim to promote connection and a sense of belonging for our community. We encourage all families to save the date for our Community Engagement events coming up throughout the year, and look out for year level specific events coming up through our Unit of Inquiry flyers.

So many of our events and activities rely on the assistance of our community members. A huge shout out to the 28 parent/carers who have already come forward to help out with our Countries of ENPS cultural celebration day coming up on Thursday March 28th. Whether it is helping out at events, becoming members of our School Council Sub Committees or supporting our school fundraising, we are incredibly grateful.

We would also like to thank all of the families who completed our student information Google forms. Information provided through these forms is very much valued by classroom teachers, as we acknowledge that teachers don’t always have time to talk with parents at pick up and drop offs, or for our working parents, there may not be the chance to catch up with teachers.

Keeping in mind that we have over 80 students in each year level, we want to thank those parents who provided a Google form response:

Foundation - 34 responses

Year One - 31 responses

Year Two - 22 responses

Year Three - 20 responses

Year Four - 24 responses

Year Five - 16 responses

Year Six - 34 responses

Open Day and 2025 Enrolments

A reminder that there is a Department of Education (DET) state-wide enrolment process and timeline for Foundation in 2025. If you have a child/ren to be enrolled at ENPS in Foundation in 2025, please note that our Open Day will be on Thursday 18th April. Enrolment applications will be accepted from Week One, Term Two - Monday 15th April onwards. 2025 Foundation enrolments are due to the office by Friday 26th July 2024.

I take the opportunity to remind families that we do have a school enrolment policy. We encourage existing families with children ready to start school in 2025 to get their enrolment forms in to the office early so we can begin processing them to confirm places as soon as we can with the state timeline. For more information, please see the enrolment page on our website.

Wishing everyone a well deserved long weekend. Ramadan Mubarak to all of our families beginning Ramadan on Sunday too. See you all next week.

Kate Barletta

Principal

St Bernard's Old Collegians Auskick