Hello and welcome to the hot weather. We have already had a number of warm days and this trend looks as if it will continue. Caregivers could help by ensuring hats are in the bag, sunscreen is applied and a water bottle is bought to school.
Our learners have started preparations for our Celebration night and boy are we loving what we are seeing so far.
World Teacher’s Day
We celebrated the many amazing contributions our fantastic teachers provide to our school last Friday, 25 October at assembly. Teachers received a certificate that held special messages from students. We are certainly very lucky to have so many amazing educators here at St Leonards.
Junior Primary Reading Data
Each year, the Department for education collects reading data for all of our Year 1 and 2 students. We have just received our latest results and were pleased to see many of our students achieving well above the state average and well above other like schools. This coupled with our improved phonics results is a real credit to our learners, staff and parents and caregivers.
Last newsletter we commented on the fantastic results we have achieved in NAPLAN and on our Progressive Achievement Test data in both Reading and Maths. We are really proud of all of our learners for their terrific progress.
After Hours Issues
Over the past few days we have had some visitors on our school grounds at night, who have been leaving broken glass and litter around our buildings, as well as stealing our two water bubblers and four bikes which were left in the shed overnight. We have informed SAPOL who are responding to our concerns.
Parents need to ensure that students are supervised if on school grounds after hours or be aware/vigilant of others that may be on site.
From Governing Council
When dropping your children off, please drop them towards the footpath, use the designated kiss and drop zone and never stop and pick them up in the middle of the road. Also, please no dogs on school grounds. A few of our learners have been frightened.
The class placement exercise has begun. This is a pretty large undertaking and takes in a lot of variables, but we try our best.
2019 saw the formation of straight year levels. Whilst this sounds good in theory, new enrolments came and our school grew. In some JP classes our numbers were well over our preferred limit. This is because we have to accept all students within our zone and don’t have enough options of where to place new enrolments.
2020 looks as if we will have a combination of some mixed grades and some straights grades. This gives us flexibility, allowing teachers to work together with generally lower class numbers. Primary Schools is South Australia are staffed at a ratio of 26 students per class R-2 and 30 per class 3-7.
Dave Henty-Smith, Principal
Jo Meredith, Deputy Principal
Kathy Baker, Inclusive Education Coordinator
