Mountain Creek State School

Dear Staff, Parents and Caregivers,

Next Friday, October 30 is World Teacher’s Day. I would like to invite you to a very special event which is the only whole school assembly of the year. It is an occasion where we take time out from our busy schedule, to celebrate the contribution our hard working staff members make in the lives of over 1200 students and their families on a daily basis at Mountain Creek.

We will have a short assembly starting at 8:45am sharp, which you are all invited to. We have introduced a new award system at our school entitled “My Fantastic Teacher” and we encourage parents and students to nominate a member of staff for a special reason. We have nomination forms available at the office. We will draw out a few names from the box at the World Teacher’s Day assembly to receive prizes that have been kindly donated by local businesses. If you can help us out with more prizes please contact me personally. We will continue the tradition with staff names drawn out weekly on assembly each week.

I came across this poem (below) which highlights the important role teachers play, in bringing out the gifts and talents of our children and allowing them to grow and develop an inquiring mind and a happy heart.

We will be having a morning tea for all staff, coffee deliveries to classrooms during the morning, and other activities to thank our special team. I hope you can join us at the assembly. Don’t forget that teachers would value a few sincere words of appreciation from you more that anything else.

On the same day, Friday 30 October, we will be encouraging all students, staff and parents to wear red, as part of our support for the Daniel Morcombe Foundation. Daniel was a foundation student at our school when it opened in 1994 and attended all his primary education with us, completing year 7 in 2001. We would love to have a sea of red on assembly in memory of Daniel. Student councillors will be collecting gold coin donations on the day to provide to the Daniel Morcombe Foundation.

Warm Regards,
Glenn

Welcome back for the final chapter of the 2009 school year. I hope you all enjoyed the vacation period and are ready for the excitement of term 4. My thoughts are particularly with our year seven students who have only 10 weeks of their primary school education remaining. If you know of any parents who intent to enrol their children with us for 2010, particularly new PREP aged students, please remind them to come and see us as early as possible to confirm their enrolment.

A number of our classrooms have had internal painting and carpeting over the holidays as part of the commonwealth government’s Building Better Schools program. Thank you to the teachers who spent many hours packing and re-organising resources for this to happen. Thank you also to Frank Cattorall and Greg Topping who worked tirelessly to move furniture and equipment. Our boys’ toilet has also had a coat of paint thanks to Ross Helmore who carried out the work in addition to his other cleaning duties without being asked. I certainly appreciate the fact that so many people go the extra mile at our school to make it a better place for students to learn.

We are nearing the completion of our Triennial School Review, which has been valuable in planning our priorities for the next three years. Thank you to all the staff, parents and students who participated in our surveys and focus group discussion or interviews. Your input has been very valuable. The full report with all our recommendations will be published on our web site in the near future. In the meantime a summary of the feedback and key findings are listed below:

Our Survey and Consultation Process consisted of:

• On–line surveys for all staff and parents. (46 staff responses, 162 parent responses,)
• Online surveys for year 6 and 7 students (18 responses)
• Individual interviews or small focus group discussion with all staff.
• Focus group discussion with parents.
• Focus group discussions with students.
• Review of the last Strategic Plan by program managers and the TSR project Team.

High level responses in these surveys and processes demonstrated wide agreement that as a school community we demonstrate:

• Excellent relationships between staff, parents and students
• Personalised attention and a high client service
• Warm, caring and welcoming school
• Genuine care and concern for all students
• Quality programs delivered by quality teachers who are willing to go the extra mile
• Excellent extension programs
• A wide range of excellent "support programs"
• A wide range of extra curricula activities to give opportunities for students to shine
• High expectations and standards
• Strong values base
• Very effective communication
• Excellent school organisation and support at all levels
• Great personalised attention from administration staff and teachers

One of the key findings of our review relates to the importance of increasing our focus on the continuity of quality of teaching and learning, in every classroom across every year level, across the school. Strategies put forward for consideration include the introduction of uninterrupted learning blocks for literacy and numeracy every day, the continued use of our data to track every student’s performance more closely to ensure both extension and support for those students who need it most, at both the classroom level and through specialist support. Quality professional development based on individual teacher needs to support teaching and learning practices across the school, will continue to be a strong focus.

This could mean some changes in our routines and practices, such as shifting assembly times to the afternoons, limiting any extra curricula activities to outside prime learning time in the morning sessions and developing more effective tracking and borrowing systems for curriculum resources. It may also mean that we review teacher aide allocations to classrooms based on need and support for key intervention programs. These ideas are highlighted in more detail in the link above.

Parents should have received their child’s NAPLAN reports this week. While there was some good news in that Mountain Creek SS was similar to or above other schools nationally in the percentage of students meeting basic standards in literacy and numeracy, I would have to say we had a disappointing overall result in relation to our expectations, given the hard work by teachers in relation to preparing students for the test.

The best way to clarify this is that minimum standards are simply that, minimum standards. A fairer comparison for school such as Mountain Creek is against the National and Like School’s mean which compares the average performance of all students, in all bands against each other. Generally the performance of our 2009 cohort of students is below the national average in many areas. In summary while we are doing well in supporting our students at the lower end to meet minimum standards but we have fewer students in the higher performing bands than normally expected. While NAPLAN is only one measure of a schools’ performance it is an important one. Please be assured that this will be a key focus of our ongoing commitment to school improvement.

Warm Regards,
Glenn.

Dear Staff, Parents and Caregivers,

We are so lucky to live on the Sunshine Coast where there are so many people willing to go “above and beyond” for the sake of our kids, our community and our environment.

We must recognize the overwhelming generosity of our local community in assisting with our new food garden here at school. Firstly our thanks goes to Ian Witten at Kawana Hardware for a generous donation of a load of garden soil delivered here on Saturday. Ian is happy to support our school garden in the coming year with resources to maintain and build on an already successful project. Secondly, our chappy, Antony Pulford, organised a group of volunteer youths who help in the community, to come here on Saturday to move the soil into the garden and to help clean up the litter from our forest area.

Anne Kennedy and Penny Kohler have worked to prepare the new garden beds and will be pleased to hear that one of our parents, Mrs. Korac-Stevens has donated two trays of seedlings to plant into those new beds. The Zoom Nursery and Floriana should be thanked wholeheartedly for their kindness and support. Steve Estella coordinated the delivery of the soil and seedlings on our behalf and continues to lead the way on our journey to increase our sustainability focus here in the Mountain Creek School Community. A big thank you to you all!

An important message for parents and carers about bullying issues

I am sure you were saddened as I was to learn of the tragic death of a student at a school in northern New South Wales. In this time of heightened awareness of violence in schools, I would like to reassure all parents and carers that our school takes a tough stance on bullying.

We do not tolerate any form of violence or harassment at Mountain Creek State School. As Principal, it is my number one priority that every student feels safe at our school.

I have reminded all students that bullying behaviour is unacceptable and will not be tolerated at this school. I ask that parents and carers take some time this week to speak with their children about bullying and to remind them of the importance of treating others with fairness, dignity and respect.

Regardless of our efforts I know there are times where even in a supportive school like ours, students will act inappropriately in this regard. The main message to get through is that students who are being harassed or bullied need to tell a member of staff immediately.

Some students might not want to do that openly in front of their peers. Please reassure them that unless we know what is going on, we can’t help them, and that we can follow up in a confidential way which doesn’t embarrasses them in front of their friends.

It is important that students caught up in ongoing friendship battles ACT not REACT. While anyone being bullied needs to act assertively, we need to remind students that reacting with physical aggression will only land them with a consequence of detention or even suspension, which they might find hard to understand.

Our school community has a number of programs to combat bullying and harassment, including:

• Anti-bullying programs
• Anger management programs
• Program Achieve
• Peer mediation training
• Rock and Water Programs
• Resilient Kids Program
• Shine Program
• Sand Tray Therapy
• A range of student welfare counselling options
• Protective Behaviour Program
• Chaplaincy Services
• Social Skills Programs
• Family Support Programs

For more information on these programs, please contact your child’s classroom teacher or Marion Brooks our Head of Student Services.
Warm Regards,
Glenn.