Hi Everyone,

What an end to another challenging year! Just as we were ready to debut our trim and terrific lockdown summer bodies at the Dendy Beach Boxes, unfortunately Covid burst our Bayside Bubble. While we almost got through to the end of the year without being hit by the dreaded Covid curse, unfortunately it was not to be. We are sending best wishes to all those families affected. While not a great end to the year, the support for those families with food (and wine!) drop offs, baked goods for the kids, endless coffees and general support and well wishes shows again the amazing community we have at BPS.

So, 2021. None of us wanted to ride that rollercoaster again, but we did, and despite the challenges thrown at us, as a community, we managed to raise $66,700 for our school.

That is an amazing feat given the circumstances and we want to thank each and every one of our brilliant BPS families, friends and sponsors for their generosity and support.

We managed to pull off the Mum’s lunch, the Mother’s and Father’s Day stalls, a mammoth Lapathon – go Apollo!, fun lunches, a whole school pizza lunch, two book drives and the recent gardening project.

While our Dads may not have been able to truly limber up to retain the title in the annual Dads footy match, they still managed to raise a whopping $31,000, and probably saved the same on medical bills so really, we are all winners. A special thank you to the dads and their generous sponsors:

Marshall White Real Estate – Our major sponsor

James Dobie, Critique Building

Garrick Rollason, United Energy

James Oliver, Jim’s Meats

Dave Mason, Mason Trampoline and Turf

Christian McCalman, Build2

Bruce Gilmore, Brighton Sports and Spinal Clinic

The funds our community raised have been put to good use this year contributing to the

purchase of new classroom furniture, new decodable books for the classroom libraries and purchasing shrubs and plants which the children enjoyed planting across the school.

Just over 3000 books were donated to the classroom libraries from our two book drives which, if you think that each new book costs the school about $10, we have saved the school a whopping $30,000!

Before we, Tweedledum and Tweedledee; Jan and Emma, put our clipboards down for the year, we’d like to thank the following people for their support:

None of the events we put on are possible without all of you so we want to thank everyone who volunteered their time, business and goods this year, especially given the hardships many have endured these last couple of years.

A very special call out to our brilliant gang of Class Reps and Year Level Coordinators, who do an amazing job of keeping everyone up to speed on things happening at school, reminding us of dress-up days and special events, and most recently helping the school get messages out quickly to parents around testing and isolating. Thank you all.

To Steve and Joel for all your help, support and good humour. End of year beers on us!

To our wonderful School Council whose support, and guidance is appreciated and makes our job easier.

To all the office girls for your behind the scenes support for our events and for keeping us honest with our paperwork! 😊

To Will our groundsman for all your help with the sausage sizzles and for lending us your much-coveted shopping trolleys – you are a legend!

We hope that everyone gets to enjoy a near normal Christmas, raise a glass to the back of 2021 and strap yourselves in for 2022. We are going to party like it's the first quarter of 2019, if you can remember back that far!

THANK YOU ALL!

MERRY CHRISTMAS ONE AND ALL - hope the sun shines and the borders stay open!

DATES FOR 2022

From Principal Steve - Semester 2 Reports