Week 3 was a big week at St Catherine’s with Mother’s day stall and afternoon, the election and naming of a new Pope, Grade 5 level mass, emergency lockdown practice and grade 5 camp briefings.

I hope all our mothers and special people in our students’ lives had a wonderful Mother’s day. 

Our Mother’s day stall was very successful and the teachers and students had a wonderful time, shopping and choosing gifts.

I thank our administration staff for all their hard work in this area and the teachers for making the experience fun for the students. 

We had a significant number of people attend our Mother’s day and special people afternoon , which culminated in prayer. We will be looking at streamlining the process for signing in next year as the number far exceeded our expectations which is a terrific problem to have. 

We welcome back James Bortolus from parental leave and congratulate him and his wife on the safe arrival of a beautiful baby girl.

The process of the election of the new Pope provided us with the new Holy Father Pope Leo  XIV.  We pray for his guidance in leading the Catholic church and emphasising God’s endless forgiveness.  

We had a lockdown emergency management practice on Thursday. This assists us with the procedure should there be a need to to do this in a real event but we are also mandated to do these practices as part of our emergency management processes. We use any feedback from these to refine the processes moving forward should it be necessary.

Unfortunately we continue as a school community, to be impacted by a range of bugs and viruses. We ask that any student presenting with any symptoms, be kept home to assist with reducing the risk of infection to other students and staff. We have had a number of staff and levels affected, leading to staff absences.  We acknowledge that this can be disruptive and is not our preferred option, as well as increasing the workload of teachers who are onsite working, we will always ensure appropriate student supervision and a duty of care to all our students.

Our new mobile phone and smartwatch process and policy was sent out earlier this term on the SIMON platform and will be following up on these. This policy states that permission for these to be used must be provided to the classroom teacher of each student via the form attached to the bottom of the policy. 

Any communication between parents and students must come via the office. 

Grade 5 students head off on camp next week to Lady Northcote camp in Glenmore out near Bacchus Marsh. They will spend two days completing adventure based activities at the camp and one day at Sovereign Hill. They will be very busy and I am sure they will have a great time. 

On Thursday, the teachers going on camp will have a TIL day and there will be no structured program run for students. We will provide supervision for any students requiring it but past history shows that many students do not attend on that day as students are tired. 

Warm regards 

Anna