Dear Families,

I hope everyone enjoyed the long weekend. I know there were a few families travelling for a soccer tournament in Mildura and maybe there were other families who took the time to get away and have a change of scenery. Maybe your family was like mine and stayed home just to rest up and enjoy life at a slower pace. It was definitely a nice change for my family!

We have our children in grades F-3 attending an excursion to the Gippsland Performing Arts Centre in Traralgon this week. They will be watching a performance of “How to Catch a Star”, which is adapted from the book by author Oliver Jeffers. If parents have not given consent on PAM, please make sure you give consent to avoid disappointment.

In staffing news, Heather Moir, who has worked at Lumen Christi for a number of years has decided to retire and will be leaving us on Thursday. I would like to thank Heather for her wonderful expertise and support of our teachers and children. Heather is a highly qualified Learning Support Officer and has shared so much knowledge and expertise with us. She has been wonderful in my time at Lumen Christi, a wonderful staff member who has always done her best for the children. We will all miss Heather very much and I know our families will join me in wishing her well in this next chapter of her life.

We have also run a very successful recruitment campaign to find a suitable replacement for Heather. We interviewed a number of high-quality applicants and we have appointed Cindy Crawford to the role. I’d like to welcome Cindy to our staff and we are very excited to have such a highly skilled and experienced educator joining our staff and working with our Foundation and Year 1 students.

On Friday, the staff participated in professional learning around our Whole School Approach To Positive Behaviour. Earlier in the year, I attached to the newsletter an outline of how we respond to behaviour when children do not follow the school wide expectations. Our professional learning was very much based in evidence-based research and what we as adults can do to ensure the best outcomes for children when responding to behaviour. Underpinned by everything that we do is the words of Pope Francis on the dignity of all people. Pope Francis says, “Every human person is sacred and should be honoured. To ensure that a society has a future, it is necessary that a sense of respect be matured for the dignity of every person…”  I wanted to share our staff learning with families because sometimes it’s important to be reminded that the people in our schools are children. When we are working with children, they make mistakes. Sometimes they use unkind words, sometimes they have trouble joining in and participating appropriately and sometimes they do the wrong thing by physically hurting another student. Children come to school to learn many things. If they are having trouble in maths, we teach. If they are having trouble with reading, we teach. And our position as a school and as a Diocese is that when children have trouble socially and/or emotionally, rather than punish, humiliate and shame children, which does little to maintain their dignity, we teach the correct behaviour and we respond with appropriate consequences. This might mean removing a child from the yard if their behaviour has been unsafe or completing unfinished learning tasks at recess. It might also mean having a restorative conversation so that children understand the impact of their words and actions on another person, to help build respect and empathy and make an apology to the person their behaviour has affected. Most importantly, is how we choose to respond as adults. We can choose to respond in a way to escalate or de-escalate a situation. What was very clear from our learning is that when we act with the dignity of all children at the heart of what we so, it will always be a better outcome than choosing to shame, punish and humiliate a child. It was a fantastic day of learning for our staff that we hope our children and our school community at large will benefit from.

In other news, I have had a very successful week in our staff footy tipping competition. It's not very often that tipping with your heart instead of your head pays off, but it did for me this week. I'm finally off the bottom of the tipping ladder and have jumped up THREE places! I hope your team won. As I write this Essendon are playing Carlton and as an Essendon supporter, I hope my lucky streak continues. By the time this is published we will know the outcome, but for now my fingers are crossed.

Have a wonderful week ahead,

Sally