Dear Families,

Last Thursday many teachers from the The Southern Mallee Network attended a Professional Development day at the Hub in Swan Hill on ‘How to sustain your wellbeing and prevent burnout in a fast paced world’ with Dr Adam Fraser. It was an excellent day which focussed on wellbeing of staff to ensure we are at our best each and every day for our students.

Swan Hill North Kindergarten

It is wonderful to see the Shine Bright Kindergarten on site here at school operational. This partnership is a very exciting development for our community. The facilities are very impressive and I am sure the children will enjoy their purpose built space.

Cross Country

A huge thank you to Miss Kelly and Mr Hodgson on organising our Cross Country event last Friday. It was a great day and wonderful to see our students participating. Thank you to all the families who came along for the shared lunch and then stated to enjoy the Junior Cross Country event in the afternoon.

Mother's Day/Special Person Day

We hope all our mums and special people can join us on Friday for morning team at 11am. Assembly will be at 10.40am on Friday. The staff to purchase a gift will run through out the day. Please provide students with money (no more than $10) and a bag to place the gift in.

Illness

If your child is unwell in any way then the best place for them is home! Unwell students need to remain at home until they can manage being back at school especially if they are displaying symptoms of highly contagious diseases such as Covid-19, cold, flu or gastro (this includes not attending school for at least 48 hours after last vomiting or diarrhea).

Office staff can only administer medication to children if a medication form has been completed by parents and carers.

CCTV

Swan Hill North Primary School has decided to install a closed-circuit television (CCTV) system at our school. Often when the school is not occupied we have had multiple cases of vandalism and damage to the school. We hope that the installation of CCTV will stop this occurring.

This Privacy Notice outlines how the CCTV system will be used, including the use and disclosure of any footage produced by the CCTV system so as to be consistent with Victorian privacy law.

Need for CCTV

Our school has an obligation to ensure the school environment is safe and secure, and fulfil our duty of care to students, staff and visitors. CCTV provides enhanced capability to protect our school’s assets against vandalism and theft.

Use of CCTV

Consistent with our school’s obligations set out above, our school may use CCTV cameras to:

prevent, support and verify incidents involving
- criminal behaviour – of anyone on school grounds
- other inappropriate behaviour – including of students, staff, visitors or members of the public. For example, this means the school may use CCTV footage of incidents to help inform decisions about student management
verify and investigate other incidents involving students, staff and visitors (for example incidents in which a person has sustained injury, loss or damage on school premises)
to provide the Department with visual

In our school, CCTV cameras are located in:

school entrances
facing the oval
A notice will be located at the school’s entrances, which alerts people to the presence of cameras and this CCTV Privacy Notice. [schools must ensure that these notices are placed at each of the school’s entrances]

Access to CCTV footage

CCTV footage is only accessed for the purposes set out in this Privacy Notice and the Department’s CCTV Policy and only by the following people:

the Principal or nominee, including people explicitly authorised by the Principal
central and regional Department staff, when required to assist the school for an above purpose
any other people permitted by law.

Request to view footage

When using CCTV for the purposes listed under the heading ‘Use of CCTV’ the principal may show specific footage of an incident to those directly involved, including relevant staff, students and/or their parents, provided:

the principal considers it appropriate and necessary in order to support parents to understand the specifics of an incident that has taken place so they can provide appropriate support to their child or for a staff member to better understand an incident
it would not cause a health, wellbeing or safety risk to any other person
it would not be an unreasonable intrusion into another person’s privacy.

Please note, our school cannot provide copies of CCTV footage to staff, students or parents The Department must be contacted where these requests are made. Please refer to the Department’s CCTV Policy.

Storage of footage

CCTV footage is stored locally on the school’s server.

CCTV footage is kept for no more than 31 days . If our school has not used CCTV footage in any of the ways set out above, and there has been no request to view or access footage during this period, the footage is deleted.

Where CCTV footage has been used to verify an incident or where it is required to be retained for legal reasons, our school will manage and securely retain the footage in accordance with the retention requirements set out in the Department’s Records Management Policy.

What if you have questions?

For more information of how our school may use the CCTV system and who may access the footage, please see the Department’s CCTV Policy.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding the use of the CCTV system in our school, please contact the school to discuss.

Have a great week.

Kind regards,

Brea

Book Club - Issue 3

Due back 9th May 2023