Welcome back to Term Three!

While the global pandemic continues to impact our daily lives, we have been able to make the first week of school relatively normal. Our experience during Term Two provided an opportunity to try several things that wouldn’t have been able to happen because of the regular school routine.

One of these was a split recess and lunchtime for children in the early and middle and upper grades. What we learnt from the first five weeks of Term Two was splitting the breaks for the juniors and senior students at different times were highly beneficial for the children when they came back into class. With this in mind, we have changed our internal structure for the next couple of weeks to allow the juniors and seniors to operate on the different timetable. Although this is quite problematic to plan and organise for staff,  what we’ve already seen for our students are fewer accidents in the playground and children coming back into class with fewer issues after each break.

Last term, I wrote about having parent-teacher meetings in Term Three. This was in anticipation that we would be at phase 5 in the restrictions. Unfortunately, this has not been the case at this point. So to ensure that we can touch base with parents who require this to occur, we will be offering three different types of parent contact/meeting in the next few weeks. Parents can choose to either receive a phone call from their child’s teacher, have a video teams meeting with the class teacher or a face-to-face meeting with the  teacher. The availability of face-to-face meetings are still restricted due to the cleaning requirements; however, I’m more than happy for those to occur if they can fit into both staff and parent’s timetables. Information regarding this will be sent to each parent before the beginning of Week 2.        

The process for the appointment of substantive Principal for 2021 and beyond has begun with the school board and staff members taking part in an information gathering session with staff from CEWA at the end of Term Two. The advertisement has been released with the process, hopefully being completed towards the end of August.  The School Board Chair, Chelsea Lim, will inform the parent community of the successful candidate once the process has been completed.

We will continue to make adjustments to the drop-off and pick up procedures to try to return them to as normal as possible within the current restrictions directed by the state government. At the time this newsletter was written was before the Premier’s announcement regarding easing of restrictions. There will be an email detailing any further changes to drop off and pick up process. We are trying our best to return as many processes and procedures to pre COVID times; however, we are restricted by specific procedures and expectations that must be met as we are a school with smaller closed-in spaces and a very small school footprint.  We are also very mindful of the issues regarding parking, drop off and pick up procedures that are impacted by these changes and will continue to work with our school community to find the best and safest outcomes for all of our children.  

Have a great weekend.

Peter Cutrona    Principal