From The Principal’s Office…

As the term draws to a close, it has certainly been an eventful one! I think every single person in our Badger Creek Community has had to dig deep and show some “Sisu” as we all had to do things that were out of our comfort zone. Thank you! From the bottom of my heart for being strong for yourself and your family and for our school. Please enjoy the next two weeks to enjoy having your kids home, enjoy their company, and make some time to play with them. Our families first adventure is this afternoon, we are heading up to Badger Creek Weir for a bushwalk. We need to connect with nature!

Boss of Safety

As you may remember from remote learning, we started using our school behaviour expectations of being safe, being respectful and being responsible. Over the past few weeks our classes have been working on these to understand what they mean, and what it looks like at school.

The focus for our school leaders is around Be Safe. This gives us time and space to work on:

• Implementing rich processes around OHS. We have been working with Alison down at region and she is helping us look through a OHS lens. This means the last term becomes OHS week. We will be training our kids to help us with inspecting our school playground and learning areas. By doing these inspections over the last week, it means we can fix unsafe things over the holidays.
• Yard duty changes are around the corner. We are changing our model to work with our current student population of 240. We are increasing supervision to 4 staff on supervision duty during break times (3 in zoned areas across the school and 1 in the library). Additionally we will have clubs.
• To keep things COVID-19 safe, we are going to have zoned areas for kids to play. To limit their interactions.
• All staff members will be provided with their own High Vis top to wear on their duties. Some of our grade 6 leaders will also be wearing high vis to help our junior students with “mini incidences”
• We are working to clearly define for our students what “Major”, “minor” and “mini” incidences are. This makes things fair for them and for us.
• And just in case you didn’t know, “I’m the boss of safety” at school for everyone. My job is to keep our school safe and help keep it as a Sanctuary for Learning. I also give this job to all classroom teachers and ES staff in the classroom and in the yard. You as parents at home are the boss of safety too. If kids are making unsafe choices you can pull rank and say, “Are you being safe or unsafe?” (Think about little squabbles at home, try it… see how it goes).

Safety is important. When we are safe we can learn.

Reports

Reports are published and ready for you to look at on the Sentral Website (Do not use the App)

https://sentral.badgerps.vic.edu.au/portal2/#!/login

We are offering a report around their growth in wellbeing and remote learning. Over the period of remote learning we were able to provide feedback to students who submitted Common Assessment Tasks in maths and literacy, which has formed a part of the assessment feedback for you for the term as well.

We have removed the continuum tracker from the parent portal for the time being, as we really want to ensure that is reliable information for you to see.

We are aiming to have 3 way interviews in Week 3 of term 3 to establish goals for the next 6 months, and of course in term 3 we will have 2 further Common Assessment Tasks for you and your child to receive feedback about their learning.

Holidays

Unfortuntately there has been quite a bit of graffiti painted around the school over the last few weeks. We are hoping over the holidays that you might be able to keep an eye out over our lovely school. If you see or hear any suspicious behaviours call 131444 or Healesville Police 59624422 or Lilydale Police 97392300. We thank you so much for caring for our school.

Return to school process

We are really happy with the amazing system you have all helped us develop over the past few weeks. Drop offs are working like a charm. We are going to keep those the way they are. So we ask that you drop your child off from 8:45am, there will be no play before school, just head straight into class for a gentle start to the day. I am so happy with the success of this, students are calm and getting on with their learning.

The pick ups have been pretty good, but we have been getting a little social outside the fences, so we are going to make things a bit quicker and easier.

Dismissals start at 3:20 with student surnames that are from A-K, and bus travellers leaving first. You can arrange the spot that you pick them up from. 3:30 will be L-Z surnames, any student travelling home independently and After school care kids.

We hope these things will help keep our community safe and keep things moving quickly for you.

Timetable

The final piece of information is that the whole school is moving to the same timetable. The day will be as follows:

8:45 Gentle start

9:00 Learning

10:55 Morning Snack

11:00 First break

11:30 Learning

12:30 Second break

1:00 Lunch eating time

1:15 Learning

2:15 Third break

2:30 Learning

3:15 Pack up

3:20 A-K dismissal

3:30 L-Z dismissal

That’s it from me for the next two weeks. Have a super break and I can’t wait to see you all safe and healthy on our return.

Nerae Preece

Principal