Principal's Update - 14th July 2022

Welcome

Welcome back to Term 3. It was wonderful to see the children enter the school yard with such excitement to be back with their friends and classmates and tell of all the adventures they had during the break. The staff were also abuzz with energy ready to commence the new term.

Whilst we welcome this new term and all that it brings, we also acknowledge that COVID and the flu continues to hit us hard across both the state and here in Ballarat. There are a number of staff unwell at the moment or away for a variety of reasons. We continue to do our very best to provide continuity of learning for our students and ask for your continued support and patience around the complexities of finding replacement staff to cover classes each day. We will keep you updated as to any changes that may affect the school.

Health and Wellbeing

We ask that children continue to follow strong hygiene regimes, using hand sanitiser and washing their hands regularly. Facemasks are being strongly encouraged for both staff and students and will be available upon request. We ask that any child who is unwell or displaying symptoms to please stay at home to recover. Your support is appreciated to help keep our community safe and healthy.

You may also be aware that there is no longer a mandated vaccination requirement for staff working in mainstream schools. This change was issued on Friday 24th June, the last day of Term 2, and has come into effect at the commencement of Term 3. The other noteworthy change is that parents or carers who test positive for COVID 19 are now able to transport their children to and from school in their own private vehicles. They must travel to and from school only and must wear a face covering at all times and remain in their vehicle.

Rapid Antigen Testing

The supply of RATs will continue this term and term 4 and be delivered to families by the end of week 3. The Victorian Government will provide up to three further deliveries this term.  Rapid antigen testing, while strongly recommended, will be voluntary for all students. The screening recommendations remain the same:

Primary schools – recommended testing if students display symptoms, please test.

Students and staff who are household contacts of a COVID-19 case are no longer required to quarantine. They can return to school as long as they undertake rapid antigen tests (RAT) 5 times within their 7-day period and wear face masks indoors if they are aged eight and above, unless they have a valid exemption.

If any household contact returns a positive RAT result during this period, they must isolate for seven days, not attend school and notify both the school and the Department of Heath via the Vic Services App.

Vaccination requirements for visitors to schools

Parents, carers and other adult visitors (not performing work) are no longer required to show evidence of two doses of the COVID-19 vaccine.

School Concert

Thank you to all families who collected their concert tickets on Monday 11th July and Tuesday 12th July. Your patience was much appreciated. 

For families who have paid for tickets and not yet collected, we have now allocated seats for you and your tickets can be collected from the school office.

There are still a number of families that have not yet purchased tickets. If your family intends to do so, please log into your QuickCliq account and purchase by this Friday, 15th July. After this date we can not guarantee availability as next week we will open the remaining tickets to all families again for those wishing to purchase additional tickets (beyond the 3 per family allocation).

School Closure Day for Staff Professional Learning - Thursday 21st July

We remind families that next Thursday, 21st July is a school closure day for our staff to attend Professional Learning facilitated by the Corwin Institute on Visible Learning. Our team will work alongside the Staff of St Augustine’s Maryborough. This has been cancelled and rescheduled many times over the past two years. We anticipate this will be an excellent opportunity for our staff to continue the work around Visible Learning, supporting our school goals set in our recent school review.

Important Dates for Term 3

Bambi Afford & Shaun Mohr
Co-Principals