From the Principal

Dear Parents

Welcome back to Term 3 with a special welcome to our new students Bailey (Year 5) and Charlie (Year 2) and their family to the Nativity community. It is also pleasing to have Emily Bowden returning to the Reception classroom after suffering the effects of a debilitating virus where she was away sick for most of Term 2.

There is some return to normality with the Little Stars Transition Programme beginning last week with 24 future reception children attending. The programme is designed to create a seamless transition for the children and their families into school life and runs for a half day in Term 3 and a full day in Term 4. Lauren Broadbent is the coordinator this year along with further supervisory support coming from Cate Hutton and 2 new personnel, Alicia Symonds and Heidi Matthews.

I can also announce our Master Plan for capital development has been approved by the Catholic Education Office and the Catholic Church office over the holiday break- at last! The next step is formalising the plans for Stage One – connecting the inside to outside Learning areas in the Early Years. Our Architects, Brown Falconer, are currently drawing the plans for the formal building approvals. Parents, staff and the students will be asked for feedback with the intention of starting the project during Term 4. This has been a long time coming and I’m sure the students are going to enjoy a new playground, a new nature play space and being connected to the outdoors for their learning. A new entrance from the Hard Play Car Park is being developed. I will post the completed plans onto the website once they have been finalised. The preliminary cost for Stage one is $750,000 through a loan to be taken by the school. The repayments are within the financial forecasting and there will not any fee increases to pay for the loan. We expect the plans to be confirmed by Week 7 of the term with a tender process to follow. This usually takes about a month to determine the successful tender, allowing the project to start by mid-November. We are aiming to have the project finished by the first day of the 2021 school year. Fingers crossed!!

This weekend, Catholic Education is running a promotion through the Advertiser promoting Catholic Education as part of Catholic Education Week in the following week. We traditionally run Principal Tours on the Tuesday and Saturday in Week 5 of a term which we plan to do again this term. Please let family, friends, neighbours and acquaintances know and to register for the Tours by contacting the front office info@nativity.catholic.edu.au.

I trust you enjoyed reading about your child’s achievements in the Mid-Year report sent home earlier this week. Please return the response sheet attached with the reports as soon as possible.

Kind regards

Greg Haynes
Principal