Ms Kerrie Williams - Assistant Principal : Wellbeing
With the end of Term 2, and the beginning of Semester 2 with the mixture of unseasonal warmer weather and then the coldness, rain and the winter solstice, we need to remind each other of the strategies that help and enhance our own wellbeing and that of our students.
The key aspects of our wellbeing are eating well and making sure that we are getting enough sleep so that we can keep doing all the things we have to
With this in mind some key information that we need to share with our community at this time.
Each year at around this time our Head of Learning Diversity – Ms Tracey Deguara does an amazing job of collecting and collating all the data over the course of the year where adjustments have been made to any students learning program. These individuals and the adjustments that have been made need to be included in our NCCD data for the Federal Government.
Please take a moment to look at the attached information, and please note that students are de-identified in the process.
At this time of the year, it is pleasing to give our community on an update on our school production – ‘The Addams Family - Young @part’ that will take place in the first week of August this year.
Our dedicated staff and cast have been working tirelessly to put this all together and at our end of term assembly members of the cast will give an update to our student community and where the process is at.
We look forward to all this hard work coming to fruition as we celebrate the creepy and the spooky family that lives next door.
In our last edition of the Marian News, we highlighted the fact that we needed to reschedule our Athletics carnival due to the weather in early May.
This has been rescheduled for Friday 9th October which allows our graduating Year 12 to be part of the day which is very important for us as community.
At a recent staff meeting the Whole School Framework Working party presented to the staff their vision for what the framework looks like and asked for input from the staff on their thoughts about what this will look like.
This framework is key – as it will be the scaffold on which all our work from a learning, wellbeing and faith perspective will be aligned.
The working party will now reconvene to review the staff input and look forward to sharing with our community later in the year this key piece of our work in supporting our students to succeed and flourish.
The staff recently looked at the changes to the PROTECT process that were introduced in March this year.
These changes look at the new categories on which a report to the authorities would take place. These include:
A report related to an adult engaged in working in the school community
Student to student offending
Child Abuse within a family
Child Abuse within the community – for example a sporting club.
This does not change in any way the staff’s obligation to report their concerns to the authorities, but it broadens the reasons for reporting in an effort to ensure that the young people in our care are protected and cared for in the manner that our families expect when they send to school each day.
On Wednesday 3 June we held our most successful Sudanese and Burmese Parent Evening were our families covered the following areas:
SEQTA and how we can use it as parents
How to check attendance and assessment information for our child
Child Protection Update
School Update – renovations and changes into the future...
We look forward to the next Sudanese and Burmese Parent Evening later ths year, as we continuing to build this important partnership with our community.
A reminder to all our families of the expectation of explaining student absences each day.
Letters related to significant unexplained student absences are being processed this week for families that have not explained the multiple absences of their children.
We thank all those families who support this process daily by contacting us to inform us of the absence of their child.
As we enter the colder months, we often have additional clothing items that seem to become additional uniform items.
These include:
Kathmandu jackets and other variations of this type of jacket, rather than our school blazer.
Hoodies added to their PE uniform that are not part of our uniform.
Other uniform concerns are:
Students not wearing their school tie – which is a compulsory item.
Wearing their PE tracksuit pants pretending that they are school pants.
Wearing nose piercings, even though we have changed to rule and students are now allowed to wear a plug during the school day.
A reminder to all families that our uniform shop is open each Wednesday and Friday between 10.30 and 1.30pm.
We have started the process of handing out raffle tickets at the front gate each morning to those students who are in the correct uniform, and they will go into a draw at the end of term assembly for a voucher.
We are also collecting the names of students who have the incorrect uniform, and we are issuing detentions for these students.