Dear Families,

Welcome back to Term 3, it’s hard to believe that we are already halfway through the year! I hope you had a chance to recharge, even if it only meant you didn’t have to get lunches ready each day.

Many of you may have noticed that work has begun on the PFAS remediation with soil being cleared ready for the footings for the building and fresh soil for the playground. Once the earthworks are complete in the ELC area, we will start to see the main oval areas being addressed and take shape.

Yesterday, staff participated in a professional learning day focused on High Impact Teaching Practices and on our new Student Data Management platform, COMPASS. This term, we will begin to use the events component of the platform to plan excursions. Staff also started to look at our school’s vision and mission statement, starting by looking at what they most loved about the school and where they would like to see school in five years from now. Over the coming months we will be also asking our students and families to contribute to our school’s vision and mission through targeted focus groups.

Thank you to all of the parents who responded to the parent survey last term. We have now had a chance to look through the results and comments. The survey clearly indicated  that parents (along with students and staff) would like to see the school oval remediated and returned to full use by students. We were very pleased to see that parents were overwhelmingly happy with the new literacy programs we have in place, particularly Initialit and our literacy intervention programs including Minilit, Macqlit and Reading Tutor. Like many of you, the staff have seen enormous growth in student learning as a result of these programs. As a school we are very much committed to delivering a strong phonics-based literacy program to all students.

I hope everyone had a chance to read the email sent out at the end of last week regarding the COVID restrictions. We are very lucky in the ACT to have had an easement in restrictions just as we came back to school. Our NSW schools sadly have had to inform parents that they are not permitted onto school grounds and that any child over 13 must wear a mask, so we are all feeling very lucky to be in the ACT.

Once again we have another full term of events and I am looking forward to catching up with many of you over the coming months.

God Bless

 
Leah Taylor
Principal