Newsletter – Week 1, Term 3, 2022 – Message from Admin Team, Kindergarten 2023 – Applications Closing, Library, Chaplain Corner, Senior Faction Athletics Carnival

Message from the Executive Administration Team

Dear parents and caregivers

Welcome back to the entire school community. It was wonderful to greet students, staff, parents and carers yesterday and hear all the wonderful stories excitedly told to me by your children throughout the day. I hope it was a good chance to reset and recharge as families after a busy term.

COVID-19: Some staff and families didn’t manage to have the holiday break they had hoped for with COVID-19 or other illnesses impacting many households. Winter is proving to be challenging, as predicted by modelling, with COVID-19, influenza and other respiratory viruses prevalent in the community. Wembley PS is continuing to manage these challenges by continuing to implement strategies to limit transmission and keep staff and students healthy. The State’s guidelines show reinfection can occur from 4 weeks after recovering from the virus. COVID-19 reinfection cases were previously defined as a case that occurs more than 12 weeks after an initial infection. This means that recovered COVID-19 cases will be required to test for COVID-19 after 28 days, if experiencing symptoms, and follow the relevant advice if they test positive. The Chief Health Officer has also strongly encouraged the community to wear masks indoors during this rise in cases and I reiterate that advice to all members of our community. The school will continue to;

• Keep hygiene protocols in place with sanitiser and hand washing throughout the day.
• Ensure ventilation remains a priority with fresh and mechanical air ventilation in place according to the ventilation assessments conducted by the Department of Education.
• Ensure students and staff are at home when unwell or displaying symptoms consistent with COVID.
• Ensure community events and assemblies are held safely in well ventilated areas.
• Implement enhanced cleaning protocols in the school environment.
• Provide a weekly community update on positive cases who have attended school during their infectious period and notify parents of individual classes when multiple cases emerge in a class.

It is also important to note that close contact protocols still need to be adhered to. If a member of the household tests positive, please advise the school using our online reporting form, located here on the COVID-19 tab on the school website. To attend school as a close contact, a negative RAT result must be returned each morning and your child should not be displaying any symptoms. We would also ask that parents/carers refrain from volunteering at school during their close contact period unless it has been less than 28 days since you recovered from COVID.

Our goal is to keep students at school and engaged in their learning and playing with their peers, particularly considering the disruption that has already been experienced this year. I thank you for your support with these measures so we can protect each other from further illness. It’s likely that we will continue to experience challenges with staffing this term and I thank you for your understanding as we navigate staff absences due to COVID and other illnesses.

Important dates: We have a number of important events to add to your calendars this term. Events and assemblies are also continually updated on our school calendar on the website here.

Year 3-6 Athletics Carnival: Thursday 11 August (WA Athletics Stadium)

K-6 Book Week Parade: 9am Wednesday 24 August (School Oval)

PP-Year 2 Athletics Carnival: TBC – Tentatively 9am Wednesday 31 August

Mrs Patricia Hawkes Retirement Assembly – 2:40pm Friday 2 September

K-6 Inquiry Learning Showcase: 3:30pm Friday 16 September (Open classrooms)

Interschool Athletics: Wednesday 14 September and Wednesday 21 September

P&C Colour Run: 1:40pm Friday 23 September (School Oval)

Teaching and Learning

NAIDOC Week: During the holidays, the community celebrated NAIDOC Week and now that we are back at school, we have started the term with our own celebrations of First Nations culture. As you arrived at school you may have noticed the dots placed on buildings, weaving their way around the school. There are 6 trails for the 3 colours of the Aboriginal flag and the 3 colours of the Torres Strait Islander Flag. As the days progressed yesterday, the following are appearing around the school.

Yellow trail (Yr 4/5 block). Learn about some of our Indigenous sports people by matching the facts to the faces.  Take one or all the 3 challenges – Patty Mills vs Hamish and Andy challenge, Ash Barty Challenge, or the Netball challenges design by a mum stuck in ISO with her 2 girls! Students are going on adventures with their class, taking an iPad so they can scan the QR codes to access the videos.

Blue Trail (Art/Music/Library Building). Learn about a diverse range of Indigenous musicians.  You can stop and listen to songs sung in language, didgeridoo playing (upmarket style with a symphony orchestra) and listen to a well-known Australian group take on a Torres Strait traditional song. Check out a range of Indigenous art in Mrs Barratt’s display and even have a go at one of the suggested activities. Around the corner outside the library, students matched the Indigenous writers to their books.

Red Trail (Yr 1/2/3 Block). Matching the animals with their Noongar names, with some names as a challenge for students to solve.

Each day this week a new information/challenge trail will be added to the dots. In addition, we have guest storytellers and activities in the library every day. The first guest storyteller…was me! I very much enjoyed spending lunchtime with Year 1-3 students, reading ‘From the Heart’ by Thomas Mayor about the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Ms Naomi Bell then set up an activity for students to learn about storytelling with Noongar symbols on small garden rocks, as we had just talked about the most significant rock of them all, Uluru. We look forward to embracing First Nations culture and stories across the week in classrooms and around the school. Thanks to Ms Bell and the Reconciliation Action Plan committee for all their hard work setting up these experiences.

Community Engagement

Communication Strategy: In recent years, we have continued to update and refine the way the school communicates with parents and carers, manages payments and event bookings and keeps you involved in your child’s learning, with photos and updates from the classroom. We have moved from paper-based to digital but along the way, multiple platforms have been engaged to provide this information, sign in/out, advise attendance and pay contributions and charges.

While we have responded and changed our strategy in response to feedback, with newsletter changes and Seesaw being implemented for a window into the classroom, it’s understood that there is still frustration with the number of platforms the school uses and the inconsistencies in communication that you are receiving. We have heard you and have been considering and researching the best approach for our school community; both staff and parents/carers.

At the end of last term, the school leadership team made the decision to move to Compass, a school management system that will connect each facet of the school’s operations in one place. Parents will access information from the app and web-based platform to advise absences, give consent and pay for excursions/incursions, send/receive communications with your child’s teachers and eventually, engage in home learning when required, receive academic reports and more detailed feedback on your child’s learning.

Compass will be familiar to those parents and carers who have children at Bob Hawke College and Shenton College, where 70% of our children attend once graduating from WPS. You may like to chat with some of these parents/carers about their experiences with the platform. This term, we will begin on-boarding with Compass as they build our site according to our specifications and begin to train staff. With a large staff and multiple features on the Compass platform, we will engage in a change management approach to roll out the features available to us. We will go live in Term 4 with some features such as attendance and wellbeing. I hope this will be welcome news to the community and I am excited to lead us through this next phase and keep building strong connections with our families, using this platform to make communication more effective in our school.

‘Collaborate, Connect, Communicate and Care’.

Yours in learning

The Senior Leadership Team

Tamara, Milani, Rachel, Stacey and Natalie