First week of Advent- Hope

God of Hope,

help us prepare our hearts for Jesus’ coming. Fill our school, our families, and our community with peace, kindness, and hope.May we see Your love in the small moments of each day, and share that love with others.

Amen.

We are on the home stretch! It’s hard to believe we are nearing the end of 2025. What an adventure my first year at St Mary’s has been. I have absolutely loved becoming part of this community and I am excited to continue growing together and building opportunities for every student to flourish and thrive at St Mary’s.

We also have some exciting news! Due to increased enrolments in Prep, we will be splitting the grade into two Prep classes in 2026. This means we will be shuffling rooms and teachers to accommodate our growing community. Our Year 1 class is also at capacity, and we have very limited spaces remaining in Years 2–5. Our school population will be almost at the 150-student mark by the start of 2026, which is incredibly exciting!

Mikayla Leyonhjelm and Khris May (nee Woodward) will be the Prep teachers in 2026. This means we will keep Jacob Rowler as a grade 3/4 teacher. Students will meet their 2026 teacher and class on Tuesday 9th December at our whole school transition morning.

I know much of this growth is thanks to our current families and the positive experiences you share with the wider Hastings community. For this, I am truly grateful. Our staff work very hard to create an inclusive, safe and educationally rich environment for every student, and it is wonderful to see this shining through.

If you have a child, or know someone with a child, wishing to attend Prep in 2027, please encourage them to contact our lovely Nicole Fletcher in the office to arrange a tour or collect an enrolment pack. Families can also complete enrolment forms online. We have already begun receiving applications and would hate for anyone to miss out.

Colour Fun Run

Thank you to our community for your generosity in fundraising for the colour fun run. It was an amazing event with lots of fun had by all (staff most of all!).

We raised $2340 (after the company takes their costs) which is an amazing effort. This will be used to purchase 5 chrome books for students and replace our most out of date ones.

Saskia is having a baby girl!

During the colour fun run we also had a gender reveal!! Saskia revealed, with colour, that she is having a baby girl! We are so excited to meet her little one next year when she arrives!

Operoo moving to NForma

As I have shared in a previous newsletter, Operoo is ceasing all operations in Australia. As a result we have had to source an alternative platform to do medication and excursions. As was recommended to us by other local catholic schools, we will move to NForma. We already use this platform for reports, school attendance rolls and basic record keeping. This will also replace the SeeSaw app, making it a one stop application for everything we neee

We will send home step by step instructions to set this up. Operoo closes at the end of the school year so we will start the year with NForma, which is an app for families to use. If there is a need, we will run sessions at the start of the year supporting those who require help to set up the app. Look out for information around this in coming days. Nicole Fletcher is our school expert so will teach us all!

Events for end of year

We have lots of events coming up to finish the year:

Friday 5th December- 2:45pm- Spirit of St Mary's Awards in the Discovery Centre
Parish Family Mass- Sunday December 7th 10am- all welcome
Whole school transition morning, December 9th 9:00am-10:30am. This is an opportunity for students to join their 2026 class and meet their teacher, preparing for the year ahead.
School Concert at Tyabb Padua, on December 10th

This year, we have chosen a more cost-effective, low key venue to ensure our concert is accessible for all families in our community. While this space does not include the large stage and theatre-style lighting you may be used to from bigger performance centres, it still provides a wonderful setting for our students to shine.

Please remember that this is a primary school performance—designed to be a joyful celebration, not a professional production. It’s all about the experience, the opportunity for students to perform, and most importantly… having fun! Amanda Strickland, Andrea Kirkpatrick and all staff have been working so hard to prepare the students for this special event, we are sure you will enjoy it. We will have basic filming, without editing, and the finished product will be accessible to all. We can't wait to see our students perform and share their hard work with everyone!

Friday 12th December 9:30am- End of school year Mass at Immaculate Conception Church

There are also lots of events for our graduating grade 6s which have been shared with families directly.

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