A Message from 

Hannah & Keir

“We would like to acknowledge the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung people, the first people to dream, create, wonder, dance, play and learn on this breathtaking land. This land was cared for and respected for tens of thousands of years. The First Nations people lived in companionship with the animals and the life on this land. We acknowledge that this is stolen land and we pay our respects to elders, past, present and emerging.” 

Rayma Atkinson (2023 Suzanne Peterson Award Recipient)

Review 

Last Thursday was the first day of our School Review. The panel met for the whole day to discuss school data, observe classrooms in action and reflect on the school’s achievements and goals in relation to the elements of FISO 2.0 (Framework for Improving Student Outcomes). This was a great opportunity to analyse the information available to the school, with the support of experts in different areas of Education and it has given us some clear focus areas for our second day, which is this Wednesday 4th September.

The second day of our review includes a parent and carer feedback session at Sprout. This will be run by the review panel members without any school staff present. If you are available at 2:30pm this Wednesday, we encourage you to come along to Sprout and share your thoughts and experiences with the review panel.

Communications at BNWPS

Our school is always trying to improve the way we operate and communications is one of our top priorities. Feedback shows us that some families find it difficult to know who they should contact about different ideas or issues across the school, so we have updated our Communications Tree to more clearly show who’s who and how you can contact us!

If you are unsure of who to contact, feel free to email multiple contacts - the person best positioned to answer your questions will be the one to respond. If the person you send your enquiry to is not the right contact, we will happily pass the message on to the right person.

Feel free to download the document onto your device; we have printed versions of this at the office and we are also working towards building up the documents stored in Sentral, so you will be able to reference this document and other policies as you need them.

While we do our best to answer all emails and phone calls in a timely manner, the busyness of school sometimes means things are overlooked. If you’ve been waiting on a response from the school and haven’t heard anything back after a week or so, please check in again so we know you are waiting.

Thank You Kelly Davis

Kelly Davis attended her final Communications Sub Committee meeting last week and although we have already said thank you to Kelly for her role on School Council, we want to take another opportunity to thank Kelly for her tireless work on this committee over the past few years. Kelly has been integral in some of the key communication strategies that we have been engaged in recently, and has dedicated many hours to helping our school utilise resources such as Sentral more effectively. Thank you Kelly, for your energy, time and dedication to helping us improve the way we operate. Your humour, drive and eye for detail will be sorely missed! Kelly has also worked very hard behind the scenes to try and get a School Crossing on Culloden Street, which will be installed early next year. Three cheers for Kelly! 

Absences (Sentral)

Did you know that you can use Sentral to tell us about your child being absent from school? You can also use the app to provide a reason for the absence. At the moment our students collectively have 1,100 unexplained absences for this year - that many days equals just over three whole years away from school! We would love to account for these absences as we use attendance data to help understand the experiences of our students and families. We would appreciate it if families could take a few minutes to check their children’s absences on the Sentral app and provide reasons for any absences that are unexplained. If you see an error in dates, please contact your child’s classroom teacher.

Yard Supervision Before and After School 

Just a reminder that BNWPS staff are on yard duty from 8.45 in the morning and until 3.45 in the afternoon. Morning yard duty is focussed on the basketball court (where most students and families gather) but does also cover the woodlands and the play equipment areas. Afternoon yard duty focuses on the Culloden street exit of the school. Yard duty teachers can be identified by their fluorescent orange vests. 

Windy Weekend

We hope you all survived the wild weather from the weekend! We returned to school this morning with a few things to fix - everything from ceiling panels and loose gutters to blackouts and blown down trees! Thankfully everyone was safe and most fixes were quick.

We want to thank the team from SES Fawkner for cleaning up Yakai Barring - we appreciate you making this special space in our yard safe again, and the kids will love the additional stick supply next play time!