Term Two Dates

NAPLAN

I would like to congratulate our Year Three and Year Five students for their effort with the NAPLAN tests over the past eight days. The students worked industriously to complete the Reading, Writing, Language Conventions and Spelling, and Numeracy tests. Their teachers and I are proud of their efforts.

Term Two P&F Meeting

I would like to thank all the parents who came to the Parents and Friends meeting on Tuesday evening. We had a productive meeting discussing the past and upcoming events. The next event on the calendar is the Kindergarten Street Stall, coordinated by Tenille McIntosh. Kindergarten families will receive information about this from Tenille soon.

Interactive Panel

I would like to thank our Parents and Friends Association for providing the funds to purchase a new interactive panel for our Year Five classroom. The panel that was in Year Five will now be moved into our second Kindergarten class. 

Industrial Action

We have received notice today that more than 17,000 teachers and support staff in 540 Catholic diocesan schools throughout NSW and the ACT have voted for the right to take protected industrial action in support of five key claims for their new enterprise agreement. The IEU Executive has endorsed a full-day stop work on Friday 27 May.

Whilst the staff at St Mary's support this action, the teachers do not want to cause disruption to their students learning and will be onsite so our classes can continue as normal.

We have just been notified that the Peter Lucas Cup has been cancelled due to this action. Unfortunately, the only schools that had registered to participate were Catholic Schools. 

The School Explorers

On Friday 3 June our school readiness program, The School Explorers Program, commences with our 'Move It' session at 2pm. The attending children will explore movement with our Perceptual Motor Program. We ask families to sign their children in at the school library prior to us moving to the Multipurpose Hall to commence our activities. Parents and carers are welcome to sign their child in and return to collect them at 3pm or to stay for the session. 

All preschool students who are school-aged in 2023 are welcome to attend our school readiness sessions, regardless of school choice. Please spread the word.

Art Show - Changes on the Landscape

The Crookwell Art Gallery is staging an art show exclusively featuring the works "Changes on the Landscape". The 12 works in this series of paintings by Margaret Shepherd span more than 200 years of Australia's history- from European settlement, Federation, World Wars, to a new millennium. The works are large, each measuring approximately one-metre square.

St Mary's students have been invited to view this historic collection. Each of our primary classes will walk to the gallery for a thirty-minute visit on Thursday 26 May.   

Federal Election

For your information, the National Catholic Education Commission has released a Federal Election report card assessing the responses from the major political parties on education priorities, comparing the major parties and their support of Catholic Education.

The report card compares and assesses the Coalition, Labor and Green’s responses to the priorities of:

• Genuine school choice through fair funding and ensuring affordable contributions from families
• Enabling faith-based education through religious protections
• Improving capital funding
• Support for delivering national priorities such as quality teaching, early childhood education, mental health and wellbeing programs and Closing the gap initiatives for Aboriginal and Torres Islander students

National Catholic Education executive director Jacinta Collins said the report card shows the Liberal National Coalition and Labor are on par in addressing Catholic education’s priorities, particularly on school choice.

“We are fortunate that both major parties continue to support genuine school choice in Australian education and are committed to families who choose a Catholic education for their children,” Ms Collins said.

Responses sought from key independent candidates are also being evaluated. 

Authorised by J Collins, National Catholic Education Commission, Level 3, 156 Gloucester Street, Sydney.

Enrolling Now

Enrolments can now be placed online. Go to https://enrolments.stmarysc.nsw.edu.au/enrol/ to enrol now.

Enrolments packs are available from our School Office or can be downloaded from our website http://www.stmarysc.nsw.edu.au/enrolment.html