Tournamnet of Minds

Last Sunday I was thrilled to observe our ‘Tournament of Minds’ Team perform their solution to their challenge at Flinders University. You may remember that I explained what the Tournament is after our Team was selected in April. It provides an opportunity for a group of 7 students to use their creative problem solving and group skills to solve a complex task over a period of 5 weeks, write and learn their script and perform in front of 3 judges in competition with many other SA schools.

This was our first attempt at TOM and our school has already learnt so much from our pioneers. Today they performed in front of our Year 4 and 5 students as these cohorts will be invited to join a team in 2019.

I know that the parents of our 2018 Tournament of Minds team were amazed and very proud as they watched as members of the audience on Sunday - congratulations and thank you to Mia, Lerisa, Owen, Naishvi, Joseph, Josh, Diandra.

Catholic Schools Music Festival

Tomorrow night I am so looking forward to our Catholic Schools’ Music Festival. We have a large choir performing and I know how hard they have been rehearsing. You’ll hear more about this over the next week and it is such a thrill to see the gifts and talents of our children being nourished and supported.

Cybersafety for our School

As I have previously reported we are obtaining extensive support for our parents, children and staff early next term in helping us look at all of the issues around cybersafety and keeping ourselves safe online. For parents this includes a choice between 2 information sessions (morning and evening) that everyone is invited to attend. All parent/caregivers of 2019 Year 5 and 6 students will be required to attend if they wish their child to have a school owned take home device next year. The Workshop will assist you in setting up safety measures, protocols and parent controls on your network at home as well as provide essential information about children and the Web.

Parent Voice Survey 

Your feelings, impressions and experiences as a St Pius X parent/caregiver continues to be of vital importance to us. Last year I introduced Parent, Student and Staff surveys as a means of giving direct feedback from you to employees here at the School. This year I am working with Deakin University who have developed a very effective tool for measuring ‘school climate’. This tool also tracks progress over time.

The Survey invites you to give us feedback. It will be confidential and individual responses will not be reported back to us. There are no ‘right or wrong’ answers, just your impressions. These will be collated and a Report will come to me for us to analyse and consider as we plan for 2019 and beyond.

I’m aware of the number of surveys that we have requested and thank you for the great responses to these.  As an added incentive to participate in this survey, parents who complete the survey (and return the reply slip at the bottom of the hard copy of this letter distributed to all families today), will grant their child entry into the draw to be ‘Principal for a Day’.  S/he will get my desk, solve a few student issues and choose how the day runs for the school. I will draw the winner in Week 1 of Term 4 and we will negotiate a suitable day. The ‘Principal for a Day’ often likes to select a couple of friends to act as Deputy Principals.   Please refer to the attached sheet for details of how to enter the Survey - the link and code are in the green box on top of the page.

Thank you in anticipation and I look forward to informing you of the results of the Survey, proposals and goals for 2019.  

Parent and Caregiver Survey - Information.pdf