Principal's  News

Dear Parents & Friends of St Joseph’s Primary School,

Welcome back to Term 2. I hope that everyone had a wonderful break, and enjoyed spending time with their families over the Easter season.

What a great week! I have been blessed to be a part of the buildup to Mother's Day 2019 here at school. Thank you so much for our school’s Parents & Friends committee for the work they did in sourcing, wrapping and selling gifts to all of our students. Our school’s mums will get all manner of gifts on Sunday. The students were very excited.

Yesterday, I also had the privilege to go to Tulladunna with Mrs Gallagher and our Stage 2 and 3 Indigenous Students where we shared a meal with other people from the different schools and community groups around Wee Waa. We also listened to the Elders as they talked about what it was like to grow up on the Tulladunna reserve. Our students are excited as they plan their indigenous garden at school, through the plants and artwork where they will begin to tell the Kamilaroi story within their creation.

St Joseph's has been a flurry of activity over the past couple of weeks. You will have noticed that there have been some changes to our school. Firstly the classroom doors. We have put new doors in, to enable people to see with a lot more ease, into the classrooms. These will be painted in our school blue colour in the next week or so.

Recently we have had builders in to complete our toilet block renovations. This is a project that has been managed via outside companies and has taken a long time to complete. There are still some changes that still need to be made, but hopefully, these will be completed in the coming weekend.

The next major building project that we are planning involves changing the heating and cooling within the school. This project will see all classroom areas and offices heated and cooled with Refrigerated Split Systems. The current evaporative units and wall heaters will be decommissioned once the split systems are in place. This project is to be funded by the school’s P & F, as well as some local businesses and families who have donated funds to help this turn into a reality.

To aide our Air Conditioning project, we urgently need volunteers to help our P & F at the Wee Waa Show, where they will be catering for the Judges and Stewards on Friday 17 May and Saturday 18 May. The funds received through this will go towards our airconditioner project. Please, please, please, please give your time and talents generously to this cause.

Next week we will conduct our annual NAPLAN testing. NAPLAN is a snapshot of how our Year 3 & 5 students are performing throughout Australia. These tests are mainly conducted online, apart from the Year 3 writing test. Some students can get anxious about these tests, however, this year it is slightly different, as they are using adaptive testing, where the test self adjusts depending on the answers students submit. If you have any questions or wish to notify us of anything, please do as soon as possible.

Have a fantastic weekend.

Alistair Stewart

Principal