From the Principal,
Diana Ellis

Welcome back..

What a joy it has been this week to welcome back most of our staff, and our students in Foundation, Year 1 and Year 2. We have also had a number of students in Years 3-6 who need to be here out of necessity. We are looking forward to welcoming back the rest of our students and also an opportunity at some point to again have face to face contact with all members of our school community.

I would also like to thank Chris, our crossing supervisor who went to great lengths to welcome our students and families. I would also like to thank our parent community for following the expectations about drop off and pick up. This has made our job so much easier.

With absolute sincerity, I would like to take this opportunity to whole heartedly thank you for your patience and understanding as I made decisions in a space that was so unfamiliar. It certainly was a case of thinking on my feet. I know that whilst many of you enjoyed the opportunity to spend more time with your children, it also presented a number of challenges and anxieties. I appreciate that many people contacted me via email or phone to ask for clarification or support, or to communicate their appreciation of our efforts.

As for our staff, they were nothing short of amazing. I would particularly like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank my staff for their outstanding efforts as they dealt with their own challenges and anxieties. Many were trying to teach their own class, teach students at school across a range of classes and teach their own children. All of our staff including our teachers, our Education Support Staff, our Office Staff, Library Staff and Jen from the canteen have all worked tirelessly behind the scenes. Many of our staff were deployed to different roles behind the scenes, and have been making up and delivering book packs where required or working on other projects in and around the school.

With few students on site, a number of our staff have been working on sorting all of the resources in the school putting bar codes on them, cataloging them and putting them in our newly developed teacher resource space. During the last 6 weeks we have also continued to maintain and update our facilities. We have had the line marking on the asphalt done at the front of the school. We have had air conditioners installed in the multi-purpose hall and we have painted the classrooms at Carlsruhe and installed new pin boards and whiteboards.

Throughout the 6 weeks of remote learning we have learnt so much. Without a doubt, there have been challenges we would like to celebrate including some of the positives being:

The opportunity parents had to engage in their child’s learning and discover more about them as a learner
The appreciation of the job our teachers do in trying to plan and deliver a curriculum to children with such varied learning styles and abilities
The resilience, respect, collaboration and support that people demonstrated
The many acts of kindness
Understanding and respect for my decision making.

Reports and Parent Teacher Interviews

Today I will be sending out a letter via COMPASS informing you about the process for reports and interviews for Semester 1. Our reports will follow the guidelines set out by DET, however in the absence of all of the necessary data and assessments to inform our judgements, I am sure you will appreciate that and they will be very general.

Kind regards

Diana Ellis