Principal's Report

It has been a very wet start to Spring, and unfortunately this has meant that a few activities that were planned for this week had to be postponed or cancelled; the risk of having to drive through areas that are flood affected and are in a ‘watch and act’ situation is just not an acceptable risk. This is certainly disappointing for the school, and more so for the students, however these days, we cannot continue with our plans when there is a potential risk to staff and students. While we aim to run the excursions/activities planned, safety is our first priority. Although we try to provide as much notice as possible to families about changes, we do wait to see if the weather conditions may change and this can mean that the final decision on an activity might happen only a couple of days before the date.

Participating remotely in the North East Principal Area Forum today, due to the wet conditions, discussion pieces reflected what schools are seeing across Victoria every day. Some key take away points were:

• Unless students feel cared about, they cannot be in the right frame of mind for learning, so student wellbeing is as important as student learning
• teacher supply is currently lacking in the secondary area (the primary area has less of a problem with teacher supply) and may cause difficulties for staffing of schools for the next few years
• having spoken to principals from a variety of schools across our area, the same issues we are seeing and having at our school are being repeated in their schools This provides hope because if problems are shared, suitable solutions are more likely to be found.