This weekend we farewell a large group of students that will be heading to Canberra and early next week Vietnam. These will be immensely engaging and enriching experiences for all of the students and I know that they will represent themselves their families and our school with pride. The staff members on these trips are ‘on duty’ 24 hours and are also leaving their families behind. I’d like to publicly thank the staff for their commitment as they are invested in seeing these extracurricular opportunities for our students

Whilst we are firmly focused on making the most of our opportunities for students and staff for this year, we need to start considering our planning for 2020. Our primary campus teachers are starting to work through some possible models Kinder to Year 6. We know that we will have another year of growth with expected enrolments and that we have a fixed number of classrooms that we can use on the current primary campus. With our grade groupings varying between 39 and 60, it is likely that we will have a model that has a mix of straight grades and composite classes. Interestingly, when a team of our teachers visited schools in Canberra earlier in the term, we visited a school of 1700 where each class was a composite eg grade 1-2. If we have a belief that we teach and engage the students in our care and respond to their needs, then the year level they are in simply provides a guide for the curriculum opportunities. Our School Association will discuss this further in this week’s meeting.

Keep an eye out!

Many teachers by nature are thrifty and we don’t like to waste what could be an important resource in years to come. As a result, we can then have storerooms that are full of excess furniture and resources! We will have a number of items that we will be offering up to the school community as part of a ‘garage sale’. Our friends from the Men’s Shed have already taken on some preloved items and materials from the school. We will advise of our upcoming sale via the newsletter and school app with all funds going back in to the school’s resource budget.