Dear Parents and Carers

Firstly, thank you for all of your support over these challenging and uncertain times.
I have received many emails from parents and carers thanking the teachers and staff for all of their work over the last month or so. We know there are still a few things to iron out as far as the remote learning is concerned, and I thank you for your patience and support.

Last Tuesday, we distributed our second online learning pack. It was wonderful to see so many children in the cars. All of us were buoyed by the decorated cars and children who went to an enormous effort to dress up for the occasions. And to think, the staff met you all in our pyjamas!

The COVID situation appears to be easing and it is comforting to see that the only new case is once again from overseas and we have not had any community transmission for some weeks. After hearing this, it's easy to want to rush into sending everyone back to school but, as the ACT Government recognises, we're not out of the woods yet. Please know that as soon as we do have the all clear from the ACT Government and Catholic Education we will begin the transition to face-to-face schooling.

In the meantime, keep up the wonderful work you are doing to support your children with their remote learning.

Whole School Video Conference

By now you should have logged onto Microsoft Teams. Parents should have received details of their child's login and password via email from the Catholic Education Office (search for ICT Alerts in your inbox). Catholic Education are also providing additional support through their helpdesk on 1300 232 448. I know parents have been using this line and found it helpful.

This week I moved the morning Zoom meeting to a video link. Children should be able to access this link via MS Teams, Google classrooms or Seesaw. These videos will enable students to continue to take part in the Acknowledgement of Country, the school prayer, recognise birthdays and hear any announcements. It was saddening that we had to move away from Zoom, but I hope this video will help to keep students working remotely connected with St Thomas Aquinas.

Assessment & Reporting

Despite our best efforts, our usual teaching & learning practices can't be implemented as effectively as they ordinarily would. This means that we aren't able to assess and report on student progress in our usual way.

During this time of remote learning, teachers are keeping records and making notes of student work and participation in order to continue building their understanding of the growth and learning of each student. They are just young children. They are not receiving ATAR scores or applying for university. They are just continuing their learning in a remote manner. Sometimes teachers of older students may nominate a task as 'an assessment piece'. This simply means they want students to know this piece is important and they are keen to get everyone's submission to look at how they went with it and determine what they might need to teach them next. That's all...no Pass or Fail, just do your best with the task.

Prioritising time, energy and tasks

We continuously get mixed feedback about the amount and type of tasks provided on each class' remote learning program. Some will say "Is that all, can I have more?". Others will say "We can't possibly get through all of it!" Some will say "We want more print out sheets" while others again will ask for more "real life tasks". Teachers are working very, very hard to try to accommodate for every child. It's important to recognise that one person's experience is not everybody's experience.

It's okay to not get it all perfectly right. In fact, there is no right. To help everyone take their own individual approach at home, teachers have begun indicating which tasks are 'most important' and which tasks are 'good to do' if they have more time.

If you're finding it is too much, please just support your child with the 'most important' tasks each day. That will be enough to continue their learning. With the increased check-ins via video conferencing this week students will be able to rely much more on school staff to understand what to do and less on parents.

Video Conferencing

From next week, every class will have a video conference with their teacher at the same time every day:

Classroom Support Assistants have also started their small group check-ins with allocated students at scheduled times. They've made contact or attempted to make contact with all relevant parents over the last few days and They are really looking forward to working with students again.

Psychologist and Speech Pathologist

We have made the difficult decision to cease contracts with CatholicCare to provide a psychologist for assessments and with Brindabella Hearing and Speech Centre to provide a speech pathologist. This was partly due to the changing ways these two practitioners were having to working with students during the COVID crisis and partly resulting from a reassessment of funded programs and resourcing within the school. We will continue to have Maddison Kennedy from CatholicCare working with students, currently via video conferencing, two-and-a-half days a week. The school is able to continue to work with any health providers families have engaged privately including speech pathologists and psychologists at the school.

Thank you for your continued support. We miss you all very much.