Wellbeing and Inclusion 

Welcome Back to Term 2!

As always we have hit the ground running and are looking forward to another fabulous term!

Community Partnerships

Karoo PS believes it is important to develop strong community partnerships. These partnerships work with the school in a variety of ways, however with one purpose, to support our students further. 

One of our community partnerships is with Edconnect.

Edconnect facilitates connections between schools and trained volunteers from our local community.  The volunteers are able to come to our school and provide further learning support for our students to meet their diverse needs.  We have been very excited to welcome 5 Edconnect volunteers to our Karoo community this term and look forward to more in the future.  The feedback from our volunteers regarding our school has been extremely positive, with every volunteer commenting how welcoming, supporting, kind and engaged our students are.

Find out  more about Edconnect at their website:

https://www.edconnectaustralia.org.au/

Karoo PS also has an established partnership with the Kids Hope Program Australia, which has continued into 2023.

Kids Hope Program operates through the powerful one-to-one model which positively impacts students emotional and social development. The high-quality training, structures and child-safe processes have flow-on benefits to mentors, classrooms, schools, families, and communities. Kids Hope operate under a simple model… One Child, One Mentor, One Hour a week. The impact… Immeasurable!

We are very proud of our relationship to Kids Hope and the support that it provides to students at our schools.

Find out more about KidsHope at their website:

https://kidshope.org.au/

Disability Inclusion - Ensuring every student at every ability thrives at our school and in life

As part of the Education State, Disability Inclusion is a new approach to supporting students with additional needs in Victorian Government schools.  Building on the Education State's vision of excellence, equity and wellbeing, this investment aims to make inclusive education part of everyday practice in all schools and classrooms and to improve the achievement, participation and wellbeing outcomes for all students.  

At Karoo PS we put in place a range of supports to further meet our the diverse needs of our students.  We do this by providing onsite access for speech therapists, occupational therapists, psychologists to come and work with our students at school.  We provide a range of exciting lunchtime clubs, Student Inclusion Resources as well as targeted social and emotional learning through our Wellbeing Groups, Social Skills Groups, Life Skills Groups and Art Expression sessions. 

Our Wellbeing Dog, Archie, is a welcome face at Karoo PS and the students often comment how his presence supports them when they need it.

Our Wellbeing Student Leadership Team plays a key role in promoting an inclusive environment by welcoming our students and families to our school each day with a morning welcome announcement, as well as promoting our school values by focus on one value at a time.  The focus value in term 2 is kindness.

Don't forget to come and visit our school at the Education Showcase on Wednesday the 17th June to see all the amazing wellbeing initiatives being provided at Karoo PS.

I hope you all have a fantastic fortnight!

Kind Regards, 

Courtney Hoffmann

Acting Assistant Principal