Principal News

Dear Members of the St Raphael’s school community,

Once again, we are back in lockdown, and our children have moved to remote online home learning until at least Wednesday 28th July.

Before the Victorian Premier’s announcement last Thursday afternoon, the staff acted swiftly to ensure that the children left school on that day with some essential resources and equipment in the event of a lockdown announcement later that afternoon.

Over the last 18 months, we have learned how to be flexible and agile in our processes and procedures.

I want to thank all of the teachers, parents and children for their support and understanding since this announcement.

We have a number of children of essential service workers who are attending school on-site. The parents of these children have provided me with the appropriate documentation, and the children are completing precisely the same work as the children who are learning remotely.

We are appropriately staffing the children on-site, and I want to thank all school staff who are assisting with this supervision. Many staff members are aware of the potential risks of being on-site with the current rapid spread of the Delta variant across communities including school settings. 

I wanted to pass on some positive comments that many parents expressed last Thursday as they picked up their children. Many of the responses were, “We’ve done this before, and we will get through this again”. This positivity will see us all get through this and work together to ensure that the children continue to learn and experience a sense of normality.

As always, please reach out to your child’s teacher if your child is not coping with the amount of work being set or the number of online Zoom clinics. 

As a parent, you know your child’s limitations. We appreciate that being online for extended periods of time is not ideal for your children, but we intend to provide your children with as many learning opportunities as possible. If you find that this workload is too much, please let us know and use your discretion. Let your children play outside, ride their bikes and get fresh air and exercise. We understand that some children will be disappointed to be missing out on specialist lessons this week. 

Our specialist staff are doing a terrific job supervising the increasing number of children of essential service workers who are attending on-site school and also providing essential resource materials for homeroom teachers to include in their daily programs. This is allowing the homeroom teachers to focus on literacy and maths with the children on a daily basis.

With the lockdown hopefully ending next week, the children will return to on-site learning, and all specialist lessons will resume as normal. However, if lockdown continues beyond next Tuesday, we will provide the children with specialist activities on Wednesdays as we did for Lockdown 2.0.

I encourage you to email me directly with any feedback or ideas that you may have to enhance our current procedures and processes. I appreciate that every child’s circumstances are different and that whilst things will work for some children, they won’t necessarily work for others. But, once again, we are here to support you and your children and will adapt as necessary.

Stay well, stay safe and let’s hope we can all be back together soon.

Cyberbullying Support

 With children using digital technology to learn during remote online learning, we want to remain proactive in keeping them safe while online at school and at home. The following link is from the National Centre Against Bullying and has some fantastic tips and support strategies for parents to access to keep your children safe whilst online.

https://www.ncab.org.au/bullying-advice/bullying-for-parents/how-to-stop-cyber-bullying/

About one in five school-aged children are cyberbullied in any 12-month period. The effects of this bullying on young people today cannot be underestimated. As most houses have multiple online devices, it is tough for a young person to escape the negativity at home. Below are some practical tips and discussion points that could be had with your children on the topic of cyberbullying.

Responding to cyberbullying

• Make sure your child is safe. If anyone is in immediate danger or at risk of harm, call triple zero (000).
• Try to stay calm, and get the full story from your child. They may need to go over what happened several times. Then, reassure them that it's never OK to be bullied and that they were right to speak up.
• Explain it's never a good idea to retaliate against cyberbullying.
• Collect the evidence. This might involve taking screenshots, printing out material, noting down usernames and websites, and saving texts, pictures, videos etc. Make a note of when and where the cyberbullying happened and any witnesses.
• Report the behaviour to the social media service or site provider.
• If reporting to the site does not get a satisfactory result, consider reporting to the Office of the eSafety Commissioner, who has certain powers to investigate, remove content, and offer advice and support. They will need you to provide evidence of what happened.
• If the child who did the bullying goes to the same school as your child, consider contacting the school and setting up a proper meeting to plan for addressing any problems in the future. Bring your documentation of what happened, and involve the staff who know the students best.
• Ask your child if they know whether the same thing is happening to others. Then, encourage them to support their friends and report any cyberbullying to the school if the perpetrator goes there.
• Work with your child to adjust their privacy settings, block other users who bully them, and have a plan for what they will do if something like this happens again.
• If necessary, connect your child with counselling to help deal with any distress they may be experiencing.

Tips on how to prevent cyberbullying

• Talk about technology with your children. It's OK if they know more than you do.
• Reach an agreement about what acceptable online behaviour looks and feels like and how they will spend time online (e.g. homework, social networking, and gaming). If you and your children have regular conversations about the online world, they'll be more likely to talk to you if they are harassed or experiencing cyberbullying or if something feels uncomfortable.
• For young children's use and safety, it is appropriate to put filters in place, set security to 'high' and keep a close eye on what they are doing online. And make sure you set agreements about how much time they can allocate to different activities online.
• Make sure passwords are changed regularly and kept private even from friends, as friends sometimes become enemies and could use their online accounts in offensive or obnoxious ways. Also, as children become older, supervision needs will diminish as they take responsibility for their own online behaviour.
• Many children don't want to talk about stopping cyberbullying or other negative experiences because they fear their access to technology will be removed. Reassure them this won't happen. Cyberbullying is serious and not a case of 'it's just words. Cyber-attacks have a lasting effect and can distress a child in a variety of ways.
• Like face-to-face bullying, cyberbullying is usually a relationship problem that starts at school but continues out of school hours, often on privately-owned devices. However, even when the bullying doesn't occur during school hours, it can create serious problems back at school by affecting students' feelings of safety, wellbeing and even their academic progress. Dealing with it, therefore, falls within a school's duty of care.

Staff News

In staff news, we have several staffing changes for the upcoming term. First, as mentioned in the previous newsletter, Belinda Mercuri and Lucy McNaughton resigned from their ESO positions at the end of the last term.

We have now employed four new Education Support Officers (ESOs) - Kate Bailey (Foundation), Emily Yates (Year 1/2), Connie Payne (Year 5/6) and Will Ryan (multiple-year level support). In addition, Catherine Talarico continues to provide support in the Year 3/4 year level and Aidan Baynes  (multiple-year level support).  

We welcome the news ESOs to our school and value their important role in supporting all children across the school.

This ESO support is in addition to our school’s leading teacher support - Shane Giese (Year 5/6), Annie McNaughton (Year 3/4) and Rosalba Squarci (Year 1/2). They have provided 8 hours of literacy and numeracy support per week at each year level since the beginning of the 2021 school year. 

Also, Patty Luna has announced her resignation as our Science teacher. Patty has been appointed in an educator’s role at the Australian Academy of Science in Canberra. This is an excellent career opportunity for Patty and an outstanding achievement. Patty has been our Science teacher for the last three years, and we thank her for the work she has done with the children and for raising the profile of Science and scientific literacy throughout the school. 

We will be advertising and interviewing Patty’s replacement in the coming weeks and wish her every success in this exciting new role.

Playground Redevelopment

Over the last few weeks, we have had a number of works completed around the school grounds to ensure that it is safe and meets OH&S compliance. These works are also in line with our school's landscape master plan which was created over 10 years ago by renowned Melbourne landscape architect, Andrew Laidlaw. It is fantastic to see these works come to fruition and we look forward to creating additional community gathering spaces that we can all enjoy when we can once again gather as a whole school community.

These works include: 

1. Construction of a new retaining wall, fence and concrete path on the western side of the school leading to the sustainability garden area.
2. Removal of dangerous curbing around the base of trees and construction of Spotted Gum box platforms around the trees along the low fence line on the asphalt area.
3. Upgrade of the small playground to meet OH&S safety compliance and mirror the large playground. New covered slide. New plants and landscaping around this area.
4. Installation of three flag poles in the Indigenous Garden at the front of the school.
5. Upgrade of the Pizza Oven area with new tile benchtops and installation of bike racks.
6. Installation of artificial turf area along the bamboo forest and pizza oven area as a designated learning, eating and community gathering space.
7. Redevelop the school entrance on Breen Street including new custom made double entrance gates on Breen Street and Cooper Street.
8. Maintenance and repair to landscaping around the new playground.

Parent-Teacher Date Change

With the current lockdown, we have decided to reschedule our Parent-Teacher Interviews from Monday 06 September to Monday 29 November (finish at 1 pm). Children will finish as normal at 3:30 pm on Monday 06/09.