Principal's News

Dear Parents and Carers,

Welcome back! 

I hope that you have all had a restful summer break with your families. It has been an exciting start to the year for our staff at St Joseph’s Wee Waa. 

Firstly, I would like to extend a warm welcome to our new families who have joined our St Joseph’s school community this year - we are blessed to have you join us. We are also blessed to welcome Miss Teagan Conomos (Stage 1 Leader of Learning) and Mrs Maria Towns (Education Assistant) to our staff. We all hope that they enjoy their time working with us at St Joseph's.

Each year, our school sets goals for annual improvement. These goals are shared with the staff and are the key driver of professional development throughout the year. As a school, we have been working closely with the Catholic Schools Office Armidale to determine our 2021 Annual Improvement Goals. This year we have made a determined effort to share our goals with our whole school community and ensure that the processes that we implement are visible to our students, staff, parents and the wider community.

In 2021, we have three main goals that we aim to strengthen within our school:

1. Great Learning and Teaching
2. An Authentic Catholic Community of Care
3. Strong Teams

As a part of our school newsletter, we will be addressing these goals throughout the school year and sharing our development. We will be reaching out to our school community to gather current data and trends, and then we will be reaching out later in the year to collect evidence of impact and growth.

One of the major implementations of 2021 is the ‘Living Well, Learning Well’ Framework. This is a diocese wide initiative that, as a system, we are implementing across all of our schools. Please see the article written by Mrs Elise Baird (Assistant Principal & Leader of Pedagogy) in the Learning Gallery section of this newsletter for further information. We will be breaking down this framework and communicating how this will positively impact our school.

I am excited to catch up with many of you next week at our Parent Information Night on Tuesday. It will be a great time to hear more about the learning that is happening in your child’s classroom. I encourage as many parents to attend this evening, and I strongly encourage as many of you as possible to stay for our Parents & Friends meeting afterwards. This will be a great meeting and an exciting time for our P&F as we have not been able to meet for 12 months due to COVID.

Kind regards

Alistair Stewart

Principal