Welcome to the 2022 school year. We hope you have all had a great holiday with your friends and families and are looking forward to an exciting year of learning. It was great to see all of the students face to face today.

It has been an unusual start to the school year, we have been very impressed with the effort that students have put in either while at home or at school. The support that our students and staff have had from families has been amazing, we could not have had the smooth start to the year without this support.

The students have had to learn in different and possibly difficult situations for the first two weeks of this year and the staff are very impressed with their reliance, respect and responsibility. We are proud of our student and our community.

I know there will continue to be challenges this year but I am confident that our students, families and staff will be able to work together to overcome these.

Thank you for following the guidelines and restrictions that we have in place. We appreciate your support and for continuing to put your safety and the safety of others as a high priority.

All year 3 – 6 students are asked to wear masks as it is strongly recommended by SA Health. We are able to give them to students while we have stocks. We also have smaller masks if any students in Rec-2 wish to use them.

If there is a positive COVID-19 case at school we will be following all Department for Education guidelines and protocols.

Below is the protocol we will be following for your information:

o Students (and staff) are identified as a classroom contact if they shared a classroom or interacted with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19 (teacher, SSO, ancillary staff or student)

o Parents/caregivers will be informed if their child has been identified as a classroom contact initially via text then with a follow up email. Students are then required to follow the instructions on the letter which include:

• if the student has symptoms, they must not attend school and get tested as soon as possible
• students (aside from the positive case/s) will be encouraged to continue attending school if they don’t have any symptoms
• student attendance at OSHC should be avoided where possible for 7 days

We welcome some new staff members to our community this year, Holly Fisher and Emily Mooney-Doe will be teaching in one of our 2/3 classes. Emily is also our PE teacher 3 days a week. Syed Janud will be teaching in one of our 4/5 classes. We welcome back Susan Banks who is our Performing Arts Teacher in Term 1.

Sandra Howlett has been appointed as Deputy Principal for Term 1 and Emma Shillum will taking Sandra’s class while Sandra is Deputy Principal.

Teachers will continue to use Seesaw to communicate with our families at home. If you are not connected to your child’s class Seesaw please contact the school and we can support you with this.

If you have not already done so please download the SchoolZine App as it is our main method of communication for whole school information.

Belinda Finlay-Smith

Principal