Have your say in the CSC School Council Elections

Following the call for nominations for Parent Member representatives on CSC’s School Council,

from Monday, 4th March, CSC will be giving students the family ballot papers at Mentor to take home. Included in the ballot pack will be information on each of the candidates to help with your choice and a ballot paper to register your vote. Votes must be returned to CSC Reception by 4pm on Friday, 13 March.

Uniform

I wish to extend my gratitude to all students and families that have set extremely high standards in wearing the CSC uniform with pride. Over the past month numerous visitors to the College have made many positive comments on the professional image the student body are portraying, demonstrating a connectedness to our school. With the winter months fast approaching students are reminded that non uniform items can be worn underneath, however they should not be visible. Students who arrive out of uniform should visit the Administration Office to be provide with a change of uniform, or if the item is unavailable, students will be provided with a pass for the day. Families are reminded that CSC can assist with the purchasing of new uniform, please contact either the Administration or Wellbeing Team for help.

Subject changes

As we are one month into the school year, subject changes have now well and truly closed for semester 1. Once again I wish to thank students and their families by adhering to our process for making alterations to their schedule. Changes for semester 2 will open two weeks before and two weeks after the next semester begins. This will provide sufficient time for students and their family to consider if their selections are the right fit. We would expect minimal changes in VCE classes, due to the sequencing of 1-2 and 3-4 units.

Justin Hird

Assistant Principal

Parking on Lawson Parade

Mount Alexander Shire Council installed signs to clearly designate long parking vs short term parking. Please take care of where you park as Council parking inspectors will be checking that cars are parked within the allowable spaces and fining those that are not.

Valuable feedback received via the Start of Year Family Survey

A big thank you to all families who completed the Start of Year Family Survey earlier this month. In order to improve our services and processes, we asked families the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with a number of statements. These included how prepared they felt for the start of the 2019 school year, the availability of uniform items and accessibility of the Uniform Shop, the process of enrolling students at CSC, mentor interviews, using XUNO, and the service provided by teaching and education support staff. Ninety-nine individuals took the survey which took an average of only four minutes to complete.

Since the survey closed, Paul Frye, Principal, Justin Hird, Assistant Principal and I have been analysing the responses and preparing a plan to address the issues raised.

Admin Finance

Family statements will be sent out shortly giving families the opportunity to check that their finances for the College are in order. For those students participating in the music program, term 2 music tuition has now been added to your account. Payment for music tuition must be paid on a term by term basis to enable your child/ren to participate in the program, ideally within the first 2 weeks of term.

Payment plans for all fees, camps and music tuition are encouraged for families with financial difficulties, bearing in mind that if you are using payment plans for music tuition and camps the full payment is required prior the camp departing and within the first 2 weeks of each term for music tuition. Unfortunately, excursions cannot be added to payment plans and we can no longer accept excursion forms at the office without the payment attached – for those families who have a credit or CSEF funding available to use please make a small note on the excursion form advising of this.

CSEF Applications

Just a reminder for families to submit their CSEF application forms to the college by 30 June if they haven’t already done so.

CSEF Applications

The Camps, Sports and Excursions Fund (CSEF) commenced in 2015 for four years and will provide payments for eligible students to attend camps, sports and excursions.

Families holding a valid means-tested concession card or temporary foster parents are eligible to apply. $125 per year is paid for eligible primary school students, with $225 per year paid for eligible secondary school students. A special consideration eligibility category also exists. Payments are made directly to the school and are tied to the student.

Application below:

What is the difference between Moodle and Xuno?

There are two different IT programs used by the college so I would like to take the opportunity to outline the systems currently in use. SMT(Xuno) and Moodle have been designed for different uses. These are as follows:

XUNO - Originally designed as an IT system to assist in the daily organization of the school, e.g. record attendance, home contact details, roll marking and messaging. SMT will continue to be used for direct communication with parents by the school (i.e. messaging about absences). This requires a login to the portal There has been some feedback from parents who are confused about the dat http://portal.csc.vic.edu.au/

Your Username and password were provided in a letter at the beginning of the year.

You can

Check student attendance
View school calendar
Access student timetables
Message your students teachers
View past reports
Book P/S/T interviews - when scheduled

Moodle – Moodle is a Learning Management System (LMS). This means it is designed to allow access to what is being taught in the classroom.

We recognized the desire from the college community to have access to what is being taught in class so that parents can work with their students to ensure they keep up to date. In response, the college has embarked on providing online access to the curriculum to parents and students anytime, anywhere. For parents to access the information they just need to go to the following address and log in as a guest – no password is required.

http://8824-moodle.csc.vic.edu.au

You can access

Each of the subjects your students are undertaking
Tasks that are being used in class.
Outline of the topics that will be covered either through the topic boxes or the course outlines.

Castlemaine Secondary College News

Issue 1 · 08 Mar 2019

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