Dear Parents and Carers,

Thank you for your attendance last week at both the Class Information Sessions and the Parents & Friends meeting. With the restrictions impacting on parent attendance at school events, it was fabulous to see so many families take up these opportunities. This week, I've sent out a link to a survey to gain your positive feedback on the Information Sessions and also your suggestions for how we can adjust things to suit your needs. If you haven't already done so, please take this short survey to provide us with your feedback. The survey will close at the end of next week and the average time to complete it is 3.5 minutes.

This week we celebrated Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Tuesday) and Ash Wednesday as a school community to mark the beginning of the season of Lent. During the next 40 days leading us to Holy Week and the Resurrection of Jesus on Easter Sunday we are called to pray, take on acts of kindness, be forgiving, fast and give alms. Our students will learn about Project Compassion and how their small change can help to change the lives of others in the world. 

Today, we were meant to celebrate our Welcome and Investiture Mass with Fr Greg at the Holy Name of Jesus Church but due to the rain we have postponed until next Tuesday at 11:45am. Our Student Representative Council will then be commissioned as the leaders for the 2021 school year and pledged their responsibilities to the roles they ahve accepted.

Parents & Friends update

At last week's P&F Meeting, our Committee members were elected to office, including David Isbel as President, Ivy Moore as Vice-President, Leanne Broadbent as the Secretary and Julie Zabell as our Treasurer. Ivy and Naomi Kinkade coordinate the various stalls held throughout the year and for a number of years, Kylie Hodges has coordinated the Easter Raffle. We have many other regular parents who support when they can in various roles and appreciate the work this team do to build our community spirit here at Holy Name. 

One of the agenda items for the meeting was to accept the new P&F Constitution developed by the Diocese and make a decision whether to remain in our current model or move to the Parent Engagament Model (PEG) that would see the school take more control over planned meetings and these meetings would be focused to achieve the goals of specific projects. For example, projects that might prompt a parent engagement focus could be changing our Behaviour Management process, selecting a new uniform or changing the name of our school. The group present at our P&F meeting voted to stay with the model currently in place, meeting on Tuesday evenings at 6pm in Weeks 3 & 7 each term.

I have attached a copy of the drafted Constitution and some information about the PEG Model for your interest.

Another of the topics discussed at our P&F meeting was the new Volunteer procedures in our Diocese. The Volunteer Handbook has been updated several times over the last year or two and I have attached a copy of the most recent document for your information. I believe the most important section and information for our parents can be found in the Summary Classification table on page 15. For close family members to work as volunteers in our school, the requirements include:

1. Provision of Volunteer Handbook 
2. National Police Check Consent form with proof of identity
3. Volunteer registration form
4. Site specific WH&S induction
5. Diocesan Code of Conduct Declaration form
6. Volunteer Policy Declaration form
7. Evidence of attending Safeguarding training (within 6 months of commencing role)

All of the forms listed can be found in the appendix of the attached Volunteer Handbook. 

It was great to have our Assistant Director, Mr Steve Lemos working with staff last Tuesday to share his wisdom, experience and knowledge of leading the teaching of writing in primary schools across Sydney. Mr Lemos is completing his PhD in this area and we were blessed to have him share his wisdom with our team. The stage teams of teachers have commenced their discussion of student data and how we will track the growth of student learning in the writing strand of English. This week we are sharing how we teach writing in each class and what the research is saying as we begin to develop consistency of practice across the school. 

We have also commenced the next stage of change in regard to our teaching in problem solving. Teachers will make a decision over the next fortnight on the strategies we will introduce across the whole school and how we will track the student progress in this important aspect of our maths program.

Maintaining our focus on student progress in reading this year will focus on refining the approach introduced in 2020 to make sure we are continuing to build our capacity to teach reading. I am drafting an information flyer for parents designed to support your understanding of how we are teaching reading and what you can expect from home reading with your child.

For our next newsletter, you will notice a shift in the timing of distribution. They remain in the even weeks of term but will be sent earlier in the week instead of a Friday. This is purely a logistical change and won't impact what information is distributed.

I look forward to reading your feedback from the survey about our Infromation Sessions for parents/carers and thank you ina dvance for taking the time to share your thoughts.

Regards,

Brooke Stephens