With only two weeks left of Term 1, we continue to be thrilled that we have avoided any COVID-19 breakouts at school this year. We want to say thank you to our students, families and staff for your continued commitment to following our COVID-safe practices and therefore keeping a safe environment for our students to learn and our staff to teach.

RATs

RATs will continue to be supplied to families at 2 tests per student per week, on a voluntary basis for the rest of term. We encourage all families to collect RATs next Wednesday between 9.15-9.45am in the undercover area. We are only able to give RATs directly to students at the request of parents or carers, so if you would like to take up this option, please contact the school office.

Sick kids at home

As Melbourne enters the cooler months of the year, we ask families to be mindful of all viruses that have the potential to spread and therefore disrupt our educational program. If your child is displaying symptoms of being unwell, please keep them at home even if they test negative to COVID-19. After the past few years, we empathise with everyone’s desire to be at work and for your children to be at school, however we know that sick children struggle to focus and therefore struggle to learn. Children coming to school sick has a bigger impact than on just their own learning. In settings such as primary schools, viruses can easily spread to other students and staff, some of whom are at a higher risk due to existing medical conditions.

Families On Site

It has been so pleasing to see parents and carers return to our school grounds at drop off and pick up times and would love to encourage more families to start visiting our school grounds. We understand that everyone will have their own pace for feeling ready to return and hope that our ongoing safety measures will help build our community’s confidence. We continue to ask all adults to wear a mask when on school grounds between 8am - 4pm, even when outdoors (unless a lawful exemption applies). We encourage all grown ups to remain socially distanced and ask everyone to stay out of school buildings unless an appointment has been made prior. We thank you for your ongoing cooperation to keep everyone safe.

Term 2

At this stage we are still waiting to hear what Term 2 will look like for Victorian government schools. We are expecting updates to the Department of Education’s restrictions for next term to be released in a few weeks time and will share these updates with families once we have received them. Assuming that some restrictions such as mask wearing will still be required, we are asking families to help us to safely reduce the number of used masks that are finding their way into the yard as they are not good for our environment, our health or for play! We will, of course, continue to provide masks to students who require them.

the Nor'Wester

BNWPS is committed to Child Safe Standards and prevention of child abuse

Issue 8 · 25 Mar 2022

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