Community Update #2 Preparing for Term 3 School Instructed Home Learning

Dear families and carers,

Today Premier Daniel Andrews announced a return to ‘at home’ learning for students in Prep to Year 10 (Monday 20 July until at least Wednesday 19 August) to limit the number of people moving across our state to help slow the spread of coronavirus.

Here is a link to the media release from today.

St Pat's school implemented this type of learning successfully last time and I am confident that our community will work in partnership again to maintain this level of commitment to successful learning for all. The State Government has extended the school holidays by one week to allow staff to prepare for this mode of learning.

I wish to clarify that the arrangement of Team Kids as the provider for families of essential services for the extended holiday week is an approved decision made in consultation with the Regional General Manager of Catholic Education Melbourne. 

Your arrangements are in line with the premiers message that schools should be open for families as noted for supervision and/or holiday program. Many schools are implementing the same arrangements as yourself by enlisting an external provider to offer a holiday program. There is no instruction from the premier that teachers must be the supervisors of that holiday program.This week is for an extended school holiday and is not for remote learning. 

Commencing tomorrow, every staff member will be available onsite to fully prepare for an improved home learning programme in response to your feedback from Term 2. To help you understand what this means, I have prepared a change2flourish post listing the changes we will work on as a staff during the coming 5 days. You can access the changes and the feedback from parents and students at this link.  There is still an opportunity to provide further feedback as mentioned in the article. 

Onsite supervision will be available for students from the July 20. Parents and carers will be asked to apply for onsite supervision via a reviewed form which will be made available on Wednesday.

Staggered drop off and pick up times will be allocated to students who attend school for onsite supervision and these times must be adhered to. Temperature checks will be in place again.

Please be mindful that onsite supervision does not mean onsite teaching as our teaching staff cannot be teaching online and face-to-face at the same time.

More information regarding collection of devices and learning materials will be made available in the coming days.

St Patrick's school is committed to the health and wellbeing of everyone in our community. It is important that we follow the State Government directives to ensure that we all stay well.

Stay safe and please ensure you read all community updates. 

Please be assured that the staff of St Pat's will rise to the challenge to support all students with the best learning instruction we possibly can in the coming weeks.

We will get through this together.

Jenny Hawkins

Principal