Dear Parents and Carers,

Welcome to Week 6, the term is flying along, and the year is almost over. Teachers are hard at work writing end of semester reports which will be sent home in Week 9, Friday 13th of December. Please keep teachers in your thoughts and prayers during this time as they undertake this important work. Many hours are spent outside of the school day preparing these important documents. I believe that the comments, in many ways, are more important than the grade assigned as they take into account learning behaviours, attitudes and effort. An accurate assessment of these areas is not always clear when only using the A-E reporting scale. As always if you have any concerns regarding your child's progress, please contact your child’s classroom teacher.

Parish Mass

It was lovely to see many of our students presented as candidates for Reconciliation to the parish community on Sunday. Thank you to Mrs Burns for all your work coordinating this Mass for our community.

Working Bee on Sunday

If you have some time, please volunteer for even an hour on Sunday morning. The working bee is an important part of our maintenance schedule, and we rely heavily on parental support. We will provide a pizza lunch for all volunteers. Please consider volunteering some time as an 80th birthday present to Mr Marsham! If possible please bring along a rake, shovel and/or wheelbarrow

Carline and Car-park

As you may be aware, access to our school site can be challenging. Carline is a drive-through drop-off or drive-through pick-up zone. This is to maximise the number of cars driving into the school zone and to make drop-off and pick-up as quick as possible.  To ensure that traffic flows as smoothly as possible through the school site, please ensure that you do not park in the carline and ensure that students get into cars in an efficient and safe manner. In the same breath, I do ask that parents use the crossings to cross the carpark. There have been a couple of near misses in recent weeks with people walking out from behind cars. We have been lucky that the drivers have been alert and driving slowly, which has avoided accidents occurring.

Parents and visitors are welcome to park in the staff car-park at any time if there are vacant spaces. Please do not double-park in the staff car-park at any time. Often staff members need to leave school during the day to attend meetings off-site.

Morning Arrival

Thanks to those parents who have helped to ensure students have been picked up by 3:30 pm each day. There has been a marked improvement in the number of students left after carline finishes. Unfortunately, there has been a rise in the number of students who are arriving before 8:30 am. A reminder that supervision begins at 8:30 am. You may like to consider a short stay option through OSHClub if this is an issue for your family.

Thank you to those parents who wrote to me regarding class considerations for 2020. We will begin the process of placing students into classes shortly. As you can imagine, this is quite a difficult and involved task as we look to balance the needs of every student, teacher and parent. I thank you in advance for your understanding as we complete this process.

Blessings and best wishes

Sean Rutledge