Dear Families and Friends of St Joseph’s,

We are now at the halfway mark of the term; time is certainly flying quickly by! This last fortnight it was great to see more events beginning to take place at St Joseph’s including the last of the AFL clinics, Catholic Education Week activities and our Mary MacKillop whole school liturgy. These events cannot take place without the hard work, preparation and dedication of the wonderful staff we have here at St Joseph’s. A very special thank you to the staff of St Joseph’s who go above and beyond to make these events the successes they are. I would also like to welcome to St Joseph’s, Mr Joseph Simmons. Mr Simmons will be joining our staff for the rest of the year to provide internal relief and noncontact time to staff. I’m sure our school community will make Joe very welcome.

We have had a strong demand for Prep places again this year. Last week I had the pleasure of meeting more than 35 prospective 2021 Prep students and their families, I was surprised to find that we have 24 siblings who will be attending next year. I would strongly encourage anyone anticipating enrolling in Prep for 2022 and beyond to enrol online as soon as possible. Should we ever move towards growing to a two-stream school, high numbers of students on our enrolment list would support this growth.

This coming Friday I will be attending the Cairns Catholic Schools Leadership Forum. Each term  all principals from the Cairns diocese gather together to learn of new system initiatives, share school practice and explore current educational research that we can then bring back to our schools to add to the wonderful learning already taking place.

We can’t predict or resist what changes may come, though we can ensure that we are doing all that is possible to reduce the community transmission and ensure continuity of learning for our students. We remain vigilant with our hygiene and social distancing of adults. We continue to clean regularly and focus on touch points where multiple hands touch every day. In addition, we continue to implement additional controls as best practice for reduced spread of the virus.

If your children show any symptoms of illness particularly cold and flu, please keep them at home. Children who develop symptoms during the day, will be isolated at school and parents will need to collect them immediately. Please remind your children about handwashing, sneezing into elbows and not touching faces. Please also ensure your child has their own water bottle for school use as bubblers are only to be used to refill bottles.

It’s important to acknowledge that if the virus spreads, we may face staged lockdowns as we have experienced in the past. Whilst this is not the desired outcome, government will make the decisions to safeguard our community and we will follow these directions for the wellbeing of our community. We have done it before, and we will do it again. Next time, we will do it better.

We have a whole staff that have demonstrated their selfless, wholehearted commitment to our students and community and I back them all the way knowing they will step up when required.

God Bless,

Megan