School Council

School Council Finance Update  

At the end of term 2 our school budget was confirmed. This year the budget has been particularly difficult to manage due to deficit recovery by the Department (we don't physically pay it back, they don't give it to us). Through careful budgeting we are on track to meeting our deficit recovery obligations. While the first half of this year was tough, we now have resources for Assistant Principal for the remainder of the year and the school was also successful in deferring the debt recovery for 2024. 

Even though this has been a challenging start to the year, we are still able to support programs including $8,000 allocated for new literacy and numeracy resources and renewal of technology including 50 new leased laptops and 25 ipads. We are looking to further augment literacy programs with funds raised last year.  

A current area of focus for the finance subcommittee is family contributions, these include curriculum (voluntary) contributions for mainstream and compulsory contributions for Steiner curriculum and the garden program. We are continually striving to achieve the best for all students and these contributions, will allow us to provide extra programs and equipment for our students. 

Family Contributions are used to cover additional expenditure not covered by Government funding, such as classroom consumables, digital learning, IT resources, art room materials and garden program. To date we have received two thirds of the proposed contributions, with some further payments expected from families opting for individualised payment plans. In previous years we typically received a much higher percentage of payments so we are hoping to improve this with further contributions and are investigating other options to fund these important activities such as book lists. 

We know that cost of living rises are outpacing incomes so especially want to thank you for your support, it is through the combination of parent contributions, donations and fundraising that we are able to offer the rich and diverse learning experience we do for our students. We would welcome further contributions so if you can please get in touch with the office.