Principal's Report

This will be the final newsletter for Term One. As I reflect on our partnership work between school and family over the past 10 weeks, I can only humbly acknowledge and affirm the positivity and willingness of our staff and families to collectively improve learning and wellbeing for all of our kids. And we are pleased to share concrete evidence of that academic improvement and positive wellbeing. Firstly, as a quality measure of our focus on Literacy in the early years, we are pleased to share that 42% of our Year 1s and 53% of our Year 2 students are already at their end-of-year reading age target against the PM Benchmarks and it is only Term One! 

Similarly, in the wellbeing space we surveyed our Stage 2 and 3 children and they have responded positively against a 6-point scale with an outstanding overall school average of 5.2. The breakdown against the five domains of student wellbeing is presented below. This positive sentiment from our children affirms the skilful work of our strong staff team in 2022 to support student growth in learning and wellbeing and to regularly listen to student voice. 

As a distinctly Catholic school, we continue to focus our prayer and religious education classroom work upon the liturgical season of Lent. Through a tight focus on active prayer and reflection, purposeful sacrifice and almsgiving, our strong staff team has been leading our children towards a closer relationship with God. I strongly encourage all St Joseph’s School families to attend the Holy Week services at St Patrick’s Parish Church. The times are listed explicitly in this newsletter and the Parish Bulletin online.

A final reminder about the Easter Hat Parade beginning at 1:40 pm Friday 8 April with a BYO picnic on the school grounds. As advertised there is also an opportunity to win some great Easter prizes by purchasing tickets in the Easter Egg Raffle! Thank you so much to all of those families who have sent in their generous donations! The Student Representative Council (SRC) have done a great job in selling tickets at lunchtime and will now spend their time early next week bundling up the chocolate eggs, rabbits and bunnies ready for the big draw on Friday! Unfortunately, I have scheduled some personal long service leave for the final week of the term and will personally miss this wonderful community event. Nonetheless, I hope to see some lovely photos and videos of the children’s Easter Hats and families enjoying a picnic lunch in our beautiful grounds to finish a successful term. Happy Easter everyone!

Some families have indicated they are having issues with the COMPASS App for online consent and payments. As a purposeful way of supporting positive engagement with this great piece of software, families are encouraged to catch up with either Mrs Willis or Mrs Chard at the Easter Picnic and they will provide some face-to face instruction and guidance. Otherwise, pop in to the front office and the ever-helpful Bec will give you a hand!

With COVID restrictions lifted, I encourage families to personally attend our fortnightly student assemblies in the Hall. With each stage scheduled to lead the assembly each fortnight, it is a wonderful opportunity for families to hear and see the showcase of our great classroom and community work. Assemblies are held each ‘even’ week at 2.30pm beginning with Stage 3 on Monday 2 May (Week 2). Please feel very welcome.

It will come as no surprise that I am very proud of the caliber of our St Joseph’s School children and am looking forward to their strong participation in the respective ANZAC Day services on 25 April. Please indicate your child’s attendance via the COMPASS notification sent out yesterday. I look forward to seeing many of our students proudly representing the school, our town and our nation at the Dawn Service and/or the ANZAC March through the Glen Innes CBD.

Our recruitment process to replace Mrs Malby-Miller in Stage 3 has unfortunately drawn a blank. The lack of appropriately qualified and experienced educators to fill permanent teaching roles is rapidly becoming a major problem across Australia, let alone in Glen Innes! That said, we are fortunate that our strong staff team is very flexible and we will be able to redeploy some of our current highly-experienced permanent, part-time and casual teachers to continue to deliver great teaching and learning at St Joseph’s Glen Innes. I will send a COMPASS notification out next week once we have finalized the stage allocations.

In closing, let us keep the families and schools of the Lismore Diocese in our prayers as they continue to experience significant and debilitating flooding events. While our fundraising efforts across the Armidale Diocese were deeply appreciated, their daily sleep, meal and education routines are poorly impacted through dislocation, damage and supply problems. We will look at more ways to help after the Easter break.

Fingers crossed that the rain will hold off for long enough that we can run the Cross Country on Monday!?

May God go with you.

Geoff McManus

Principal