Dear parents and carers,

Welcome back to 2022. I am excited for the possibilities that lay before us this year. As you know my family and I have relocated to Grenfell and we are looking forward to being involved in the community, settling in and making Grenfell our home. 

The staff and I have been busy preparing for the return of students to the 2022 school year. I am impressed and proud to be leading a team that is so committed and dedicated to their craft. They are eager and willing to undertake professional learning implemented by Catholic Education, which is based on scientific research of how students best learn. This involves embedding high impact teaching practises into their classroom to benefit their students. 

Welcome to our new students 

We welcomed many new faces to our school community this week and are very excited that we now have 40 enrolments! In Kindergarten we welcome Harper, Lettie, Frankie, Zayd and Gus. In 2/3/4 we welcome Braxton and Angus and in 5/6 Aleisha. They all seem very settled at our beautiful school and the students in their classes have made them feel very welcome!

 Covid-19

 Of course, our community continues to be impacted by the Covid19 pandemic. Our focus as a school community is on minimising the risk to students and staff so that we can provide quality education to our students, in a face-to-face setting. As you would have read in my Compass notice last week, we are required to follow the NSW Safe Return to School Guidelines. This includes staff and students undergoing Rapid Antigen tests twice a week on Mondays and Wednesdays as a precautionary measure. If anyone tests positive, they are required to notify me by email, lodge the result on NSW Health and isolate for 7 days. Please refer to that post for further details. You will receive daily COVID updates from me on Compass outlining any positive cases that have been reported. 

You will have noticed that your child only received one week’s supply of RAT tests due to difficulties with our delivery. We now have the next two week’s (4 tests) ready for parents to collect tomorrow - Friday 4/02/2022 8:30am-4pm from the Office. Please contact the office if you are unable to come in to collect. Thank you to Henry Lawson High School and Hennessy Catholic College Young for sharing supplies with us! 

To keep our students safe and our school open, we need to ensure that we are reducing the risk of infection as much as possible. Students will be asked to stay within their cohorts (which in our setting is our 3 class groups) during class time, and when eating and playing on the playground, to minimise the risk of spreading infection across cohorts. I acknowledge that this is difficult for our students, as they have friends in other classes that they would love to play with. Please know we have the best interests of our students as a priority and this measure is only temporary. We have been instructed to avoid mingling or congregating in large groups. Therefore, as a staff we have met online to complete our start of year administration tasks and professional learning and will continue to do so until safe to meet as a group again face to face.

 Swimming Carnival

 Sadly, the Covid restrictions will also affect many of our community events scheduled for the start of year, the main one being the swimming carnival. We are excited to be able to give the students the opportunity to participate in the swimming carnival, however for it to go ahead in a safe manner we are temporarily changing the format this year from an evening event to a daytime event, to minimise the risk of transmission to our students and staff and to be able to implement clear structures and processes for a Covid safe event. Students will sit in class groups instead of house groups to remain in their cohorts. Any parents that choose to attend will be asked to please stay in a designated spectator area and asked to not mingle with students. 

 The Swimming Carnival will be held on Thursday 10th February. Students will come to school by their usual arrangements and will then be taken by bus to the pool at 9:20am. We are pleased to be able to offer the regular program, that includes students of all swimming abilities. Nomination forms will be sent home today. Students will return to school by bus on completion of the carnival (estimated to be just after lunch) and will go home at 3:20pm as usual.

 Compass App

 Please ensure you have the Compass app to receive notifications when communications are posted on the newsfeed. Compass will be our main form of direct communication, as well as our weekly newsletter.

 I very much look forward to when we can safely hold community events again to welcome parents and families into the school. It is very important to me that the staff and myself have the opportunity to involve parents in their child’s schooling and I am keen to get to know the students and their families. 

Together at St Josephs this year we will work together to Aspire, Believe and Connect. 

Kind Thoughts,

Melissa Hotham

Principal