PRINCIPAL'S MESSAGE

Dear Parents and Guardians,

Helping out

One of the nicest aspects to Australian culture is the willingness to help out. The natural disasters experienced over the summer months in Australia has proven that over and over again. Our school community reflects this clearly in the offers to assist, the volunteers we have and engagement with parents in the education and school life of their children.

Yesterday our Senior Swimming Sports were held at Korumburra pool. The three combined schools, St Laurie's, St Joseph's and Chairo, competed in a fun, energetic and well run event. Both our school and St Joe's had brand new PE teachers and this did not cause any disruption as they stepped into the roles, picking up the traditions and previous planning and organisation and bringing their own organisational flair to the event. They are to be congratulated on making their first big event such a success. Also critical to the smooth running of the day were the amazing parent volunteers who stepped in to be place judges, scoring support and general helpers.

Volunteers at events make our school life very engaging and successful. We held our first Parent Helper Induction evening last night (under the Child Safe Standards this is now required). We had 15 parents come and participate. They are now forming the pool of parents available to attend camps and excursions in 2020. We will run 2 additional volunteer induction evenings for camps and excursions sessions for anyone who missed last night;  Monday 17th March 9:15 in the staff room and Tuesday April 21st at 4pm.  Please mark this time on your calendar and we will look forward to seeing you then. The session is less than 30 minutes. The dates are in the school calendar on PAM/SimonEverywhere. 

Communication continues to be a challenge as we move off our various platforms onto a single platform. We will be using PAM/SimonEverywhere (which is a phone app which displays PAM and has some extra features) for ALL our school communication now. You will use this to find absence notification, reports, book parent teacher interviews, see the calendar, see daily messages,  find links to policies and helpful links and see your child's profile (including NAPLAN results). You will also now receive notification of any accident, injury or illness that brings your child to the office. If you have not verified your email using the PAM web interface we would ask you do so (I think we have 20 PAM accounts that have not been accessed). Increasingly we will use email via PAM to alert you to events. We hope to also be able to send a push notification and upload attachments to daily messages to ensure people are fully informed.

Wishing you a great start to term,

Kate Dourley

PRAYER 

Deuteronomy 31:6

Be strong and courageous.

Do not be afraid or terrified because of them,

for the Lord your God goes with you;

he will never leave you nor forsake you.