My thanks to all who took the opportunity to have a discussion with your child’s teacher at interviews last week. I also thank you for your patience with using our online booking process. Like all things IT and involving passwords, sometimes it can be frustrating. Mr Wigg makes fun of my thousand post it notes to remember my passwords for those obscure ones I use rarely. I’m sure we all have systems of our own but if you are like me I wish they would all work the same as mine. Some want 6 letters, some 12 letters & variations on capital letters etc, so I understand your issues. Please persevere with all our online systems. The beauty of COMPASS is that all things will put under one umbrella & therefore you will only need one password to remember. If you have not touched base at all with your child’s teacher please try to do so. We value your interest and input into your child’s education.

One of our school improvement goals this year is about Religious Education. Through worked started by Mrs Seaman and being continued by Mr Brown and the staff, we are updating the units we are teaching in Religious Education. We are realistic in understanding that many of our students might not be Catholic or are Catholics who attend mass less often. Our Religious Education programme wants us to give our children greater understanding of why we have certain traditions and their relationship to our current lives. It encourages them to study the bible and understands its context, message and applications to our lives. Our Religious Education programme has been enhanced by the employment of our Youth Worker Gerard. He has lead Yrs 5 & 6 already in some retreat days. Last Friday Year 4 had a special retreat day on the Eucharist supporting those who are going to make their 1^st Communion and giving their class mates a better understanding of why this sacrament is so important. We were very blessed to have students from Trinity Catholic College Youth Ministry Team to help run the day. Thanks to Gerard and the Trinity team for doing such a great job.

The NSW state government has given some extra funding to give students a boost who may have missed some learning due to the COVID lockdown. We will be using that funding to employ a new Classroom Assistant, Miss Bella Campbell, who will commence her role shortly. She will be working under Mrs Seaman’s direction on some our intervention programmes such as Mastery Maths, Minilit or Multlit and Reading tutor. Your child might be part of one of these programmes for a period of time. These children would be identified through our school testing programme as benefitting from some small group work because a concept might have slipped by them during remote learning. Our school returned fairly quickly to face to face learning and we don’t feel students lost a lot of learning time but we are always happy for some funding to give students extra targeted support.

Mrs Bool is on leave till the end of May for family reasons and we are working on a replacement. Mrs Yeo will be taking maternity leave in Terms 3 &4 and we hoped to have her replacement sorted shortly