From the Principal

Dear Monty South Community,

A huge congratulations to our interschool teams on such an excellent grand finals achievement last week! Lachie was beaming with the results of five out of the six teams winning the grand finals. Thank you to all the year 6 staff and parents for supporting our students throughout our inter-school competition. We have a big term 3 in the sporting arena next term, so please keep a look out for Compass notifications.

This week we sent out Semester 1 reports and a survey to give us feedback on the Reporting Trial- Assessment and Reporting 2022-2023 which was set up and developed by the previous administration team. As with any trial, you do not change the goal post halfway through, so the current leadership team are very much relying on the feedback from students, parents and staff to align reporting to student learning and wellbeing. I have already tabled the Trial documentation with School Council and will work with the School Improvement Team, Education Committee and School Council to improve on the current reporting policy and procedures.

Last night we had our Prep-Information evening for our 2024 student cohort. It was a great night which was very well attended. If you have a child coming into Prep next year and you have not applied for enrolment, please submit an application by the 28 July. Although, you may be in our zone it is important for us to have accurate numbers for class structures. Since the Department introduced a new Enrolment Policy at the beginning of this term, please contact Jenny Vergers or check our website for the new documentation. If you have a child coming into Prep next year and you were unable to attend last night, the PowerPoint will be made available to you. Thank you to Kate, David, Maree, Jenny V and Jenny H for all the hard work they put into making this evening so successful as well as all the other staff who made the Library and the Staffroom look so beautiful.

Our workforce plan is coming along nicely, and the staff and I are working through the positions that were advertised. I will let you know the successful applicants as soon as we complete the recruitment process. This is particularly pertinent to Tom and Teagan’s classes.

Last Tuesday we held our second School Council meeting for this term. I am pleased to say that our committees are very active and are getting through many tasks that have been identified. Congratulations to the Facilities and Environment Committee who have completed the 2023 Infrastructure Plan for improvements and will be made available to the community shortly. Thank you to Kirstie Lay for providing vital information to the committee in order to complete the plan. This will be a good way of connecting the fabulous fundraising that is done by the school through the P&F and target those inactive spaces to become teaching and learning environments. Well done everyone 😊

Following on from School Council, our P&F have put out their survey to garner feedback about the very successful 2023 Fete. You will find the link in this newsletter in the P&F section. This survey has also been provided to Panorama Heights Kindergarten in order to catch as many participants as possible.

On an operational matter, my front office staff are currently making phone calls to families who have not made parent payments this year. Please contact my Business Manager, Paula Hogan or me if you need to make alternative arrangements. The school relies heavily on parent contributions which totals $118,137 for this year, and our year to date is $90,640 so if you can please keep it going, thank you.

As of Term 3, our newsletter is going to go back to a PDF publication. We will provide it to you as a link and will have hard copies available in the front office. Please also note that our Calendar has now changed and it is in a much easier format on Compass.

If you are travelling during the school holidays have a wonderful time away. If you are having a staycation, have a great time relaxing, I think we all need a bit of a break.

Thank you to all my staff for the last nine weeks, enjoy a well-earned break. 

Keyla Jeffers