From the Principal's Desk
School Operations
Welcome back to Term 3! I hope you all had the opportunity to rest and recalibrate over the holiday period with no alarm clocks, no lunch boxes and no school uniforms to wash.
As we return to school you will notice that many of our COVIDSafe practices will remain in place to reflect the current advice from the Department of Education and Training (DET) and Victorian Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) so as to keep our community safe:-
- Hand Sanitiser: All children and families entering classrooms are asked to sanitise their hands upon entry. Hand sanitiser can be found at the entry of each learning community
- Masks: Household contacts attending school who are over 8 years of age are required to wear face masks indoors unless they have a valid exception
- Physical distancing: strategies to support physical distancing among all students and staff will continue to be implemented where possible. Staff should practise physical distancing 1.5m between themselves and other staff members or adults to the extent that is reasonably practicable.
- Rostering: Staggered times to use shared spaces (e.g. lunchroom) continue to operate for staff
- Ventilation: Windows and doors are to remain open as far as possible. Air purifiers operate in all learning communities, shared spaces and offices
- Ues of outdoor spaces for gatherings will continue
Positive Behaviour
To set our children up for success from the return to school from remote and flexible learning, we as a community have needed to review completely our approach for supporting student behavior.
We have used the Positive Behavior Support framework to document the way we recognize and respond to student behavior, where proactive strategies are designed aimed at decreasing behaviours of concern and replacing them with pro-social skills that lead to enhanced social competence.
Our system details behaviour management guidelines that clearly articulate positive behaviour expectations, support systems and responses in order to create learning environments in which all students are included and feel safe and supported.
The plan consists of three parts:
- Behavioural Expectations that we must all adhere to
- Positive recognition and feedback that students will receive for adhering to these expected behaviours
- Hierarchy of Consequences that are applied when students choose to behave inappropriately.
In order to make the plan work, we needed to get children to buy into the process and allow them to voice and own the behavioral expectations they have of each other. Hence, our Behavioural Matrix was born - a set of pro-social behaviors students expect of each other in various school environments: classrooms, playground, online, inline, eating area, and the toilets.
In developing the matrix, each class spent a sequence of sessions exploring and documenting their expected behaviors of each other in the different environments. This was taken to the Student Leadership Team to ratify and concise the behaviours.
Today, our students are proud to launch our framework by publishing our Behavioral Matrix to the school community-
Over the coming days, each class will revisit the matrix and the expected behaviours in each of the school environments-
along with our Everywhere, All the Time rules-
To provide further detail, I have also attached our newly developed Behavioural Support Policy: A Planned Approach for Recognising and Responding to Behaviour and the new overarching Student Behavior Policy (that all MACS schools must abide by).
Parents And Friends (PFA) Association AGM.
Our Annual General Meeting (AGM) for our Parents and Friends Association (PFA) will be held on Thursday 14th July commencing at 6:30pm.
At this meeting, we will be electing our President and associated Office Bearers.
The PFA is your opportunity to increase community engagement, enhance school/parent partnerships, and meet new people along the way.
Please feel free to come along to our AGM so that your voice can be heard! Everyone is welcome.
Student Reports & Portfolios
I trust you all had the opportunity to explore your child's Report and Portfolio and celebrated with them their successes. We ask that you return the Portfolio to school by the end of this week so that we can continue to add more work samples.
God bless
Anthony Hyde
(Principal)