From The Principal

From the Principal

Breaking news... We are back tomorrow!!!! And a reminder we are back on Friday too! 

In other news... This morning, Kristy, Andy McNeilly and I participated in a 3 hour long zoom meeting with Principals from our Network in Barwon South East and we had Russell Quaglia present to us about Student Voice and aspirations. Russell reminded us of how lucky we are in Australia as many schools in the US have not returned for over 12 months. It gave me a sense of gratitude and relief, especially when no new cases was also reported! 

I want to take this opportunity to thank our community for their support of us during the past 5 days. Last Friday was a challenging day for all on staff and no doubt for families too. 

Like many of you worried about your child’s progress, I too worry about my 3 kids. It’s my job as a parent to worry but it’s also my job to let them be kids too! We did our best to support our three and their learning and we hope that it doesn’t occur again. If it does we know we can do it! 

We have rescheduled the Curriculum Day from this Friday to Monday, March 22nd. This day is one of 4 curriculum days that all State schools can take for various aspects of school at their discretion. We endeavour to provide as much notice as possible to parents and we were lucky that SMART spelling were able to reschedule too. I’m looking forward to staff having a consistent framework across all year levels in the teaching of spelling after we undertake the professional learning in March. 

Thanks to families for taking calls from teachers this week too. As I said in a previous email, we all would prefer to have had face to face meetings but given the circumstances we can’t.

Thanks to our magnificent staff. I know we had some concerns on Friday and many were worried over the weekend. On Monday the staff sprung into action. The collaboration and hard work to get work out to families, was sensational. I was so proud of them and how they worked to respond to this lockdown. 

Thanks to staff who volunteered to supervise the students onsite and take care of them. 

Thanks to the amazing office staff who assisted staff, families and I, to make this transition as smooth as possible. 

Hopefully this was just 1 circuit breaker and we can get back into the swing of learning onsite, build trust between home and school and entrench a sense of self worth and connectedness as a community.

See you all in the morning! Just a reminder for the adults to remain outside of classrooms, have your masks on and give your kids a great start to the day. 

Enjoy the rest of the week. 

Scott McCumber

Principal