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Dear Parents and Carers,
Welcome to Term 3! I hope you and your family had the opportunity to find time to rest and relax over the school holiday period. Unfortunately, the predicted increase of Covid cases in the ACT has seen all Catholic Schools in the ACT and NSW adopt more stringent Covid measures for Term 3. See below for further information.
Student Achievements- Swimming and Netball
We have had several significant student achievements brought to my attention that I would like to share with you in swimming and netball.
Annie M, Olivia C, Zara Y and Will and Noah B represented the Tuggeranong Region at the ACT swimming carnival back in May. An outstanding achievement by some very talented swimmers. Annie M was selected to represent the ACT (and SFA) at the upcoming Australian School Sports swimming meet in August 2022. Annie placed three times in the top 10 in the 10 yr old Country swimmers and has qualified to swim at the Junior State meet in September. Congratulations, Annie and all our swimmers, on their achievements!
Netball
On the 2nd and 3rd of July, the ACT Junior Netball Championships were held in Lyneham. We had a number of our students playing for TNA. This was a full weekend of netball for all participants on what was reported to be an extremely cold weekend!
Some of our Yr 6 girls Willow B, Gracie J, Elissa G and Keira K all played in the U12, Div 2 competition. They came out as undefeated winners in their Division.
Linley S and Mackenzie M, Ava C and Olivia C all played in the U11 competition. With a few wins and some tough games, these girls played extremely well over the weekend.
A further congratulations to Amelia A and Georgia K who were selected for the TNA Development Academy. Congratulations to all our representative netballers who represented our school and the Tuggeranong region so well.
Covid Measures for Term 3
As outlined in my letter on Tuesday, Catholic Education has adopted more stringent Covid measures for Term 3 to minimise the transmission of Covid and ensure our schools remain open. As reported in the media, there is a predicted Covid peak forecast in weeks 4 and 8 of this term which could see triple the number of Covid cases currently being seen in the community. This would have a significant effect on school operations and the continuity of Teaching and Learning in Schools. To try and minimise the impact on school operations, Catholic Education has taken a risk-averse approach to ensure the maximum number of staff are available in schools. This means the following measures are being undertaken:
- Any event that could take extra staff away from the school in Term 3 should be reconsidered and if possible, postponed. This includes planned excursions and camps. For Term 3, we will not be charging the excursion levy to parents. Where possible and in a Covid safe way, we will continue to host incursions for our students.
- We are still planning on hosting our Athletics Carnival in Week 4 as it is in the local area and completely outdoors, more information will follow shortly.
- Parents will be notified if 25% of a cohort contracts Covid in a 7-day period. It is extremely important you notify the school if your child contracts covid via email stfranciscalwell@cg.catholic.edu.au or by submitting an absence note on Compass. These will be tracked to notify parents if we reach the 25% threshold.
- Current ACT health advice is for close or household contacts to not attend school if practicable. If students do need to attend, they can as long as they are asymptomatic, conduct a RAT test 24 hours before returning to school and then again every 48 hours while they are a close/household contact.
- If students are symptomatic, they are not to attend school. If students present with unexplained symptoms at school, they will be isolated and parents contacted to pick them up from school.
- Schools are to limit the number of visitors they have onsite. This unfortunately, includes parents attending assemblies. Those who were able to attend an assembly last term will know that this decision is one I am particularly saddened by.
- We can continue our morning and afternoon pick-up and drop-off arrangements; however, we will need to be stricter with the number of people we can accommodate in the hall. This may mean a longer wait time to pick up your children. My advice is to grab a coffee and if possible, come a little later when the flow of parents is greatly diminished. We are staffed to provide supervision until 3:30 pm.
- Any meetings between staff and parents should be conducted remotely wherever possible.
- The school will continue to use all resources available to ensure adequate supervision ratios at school. In the event a significant number of staff are unavailable, there may be a time when we may need to keep cohorts at home, provide minimal supervision or most unlikely close the school under the direction of the Director of Catholic Education. In any of these cases, we will endeavour to provide parents with as much advance warning as possible.
- Unlike Term 1, we will be unable to provide work for students who are required to learn from home this term. To support students who are required to learn from home the following resource has been put together to use while students are not in attendance at school.
Parent Support - Remote Learning Resources.pdf
There is a lot of information above which may take a while to digest. Tiffany Reedy and I will have a briefing for parents and try and answer some questions next week via MS Teams on Monday at 10:30 am and Thursday at 3:30 pm NB. please note the content of these meetings will be the same. The links to these meetings are below:
- Monday 25th July 10:30 am- Click here to join the meeting
- Thursday 28th July 3:30 pm- Click here to join the meeting
I know there will be a lot of disappointment in the community about events that are unable to proceed this term and parents not being able to attend onsite assemblies and other events. My hope is that these predictions do not come to fruition, and we are able to resume more normal school operations sooner than expected. I thank you for your patience and understanding as we navigate these challenging times.
Celebration Mass for Lisa Conroy
Our planned celebration mass for Lisa Conroy will still go ahead in Week 3. We will unfortunately, be unable to invite the broader community as originally planned. Lisa will receive a gift from the Community Council on behalf of the parent body to recognise her contribution to the school over many years. We are putting together a memory book for Lisa. If you have any messages, memories or artworks you would like to contribute to Lisa, please email them to jo.grogan@cg.catholic.edu.au by the end of Week 2.
Blessings and best wishes for the week ahead
Kind regards
Sean Rutledge
Principal
Weekend Gospel Reflection
In Sunday’s gospel, Jesus provides his disciples, and all Christians, with a model for prayer. In keeping with this modelling by Jesus, it is significant that the Lord’s Prayer, or Our Father, is the common prayer of all Christians, regardless of denomination.
The parable and teaching that follow the Lord’s Prayer make clear the particular purpose of prayer that Jesus was highlighting – prayer as petition. In this instance, Jesus assures us that if we pray for what we need with conviction and confidence, then God cannot fail to respond to our prayer. Jesus in fact encourages us to be demanding and persistent in our prayer. However, the parable used to demonstrate the persistent nature of prayer is not focused on demands for selfish purposes, but rather the neighbour needs assistance in fulfilling his obligations of hospitality to a traveller. He is not waking his neighbour in the middle of the night to ask for bread for himself; he asks for bread to give to his guest. He asks for help to fulfil his duty and responsibility. This gives us something of an idea about how we might focus our prayer. Praying for a pony or new bike isn’t quite in the same league!
The final element of the gospel passage provides us with a description of God’s love and care by something of a negative comparison: if human parents would not do harm instead of good to their children, God is even less likely to act like this towards us. It’s a bit of an odd way around of saying that God’s love is greater than anything within our experience or imagination.
A crucial aspect of prayer is the attitude with which we view God. We trust in God’s character that it is not a pointless exercise to ask for something. We trust that God is even more loving than a parent who tries to give their child what they need. If we did not make these basic assumptions about God, there would be little point in prayer. When our prayer lives falter at times, perhaps we need to first check out our relationship with God and our attitude towards God before trying to ‘fix’ the ways we pray. (Reflection by Greg Sunter).
This week as a family, take time to talk about prayer. Share with your children how you pray, when you pray and why. You may want to add a communal prayer time into your families schedule. A simple way of doing this is by saying grace before meals, or a night prayer before turning the lights off.
St Vincent de Paul Winter Appeal
THANK YOU SO MUCH for all your generous donations to the Vinnies Winter Appeal! Today the Mini-Vinnies team packed up the canned and dry goods donated and moved them to the parish centre. As it was raining we needed to use Mrs Thomas's car so we didn't take more than one trip and we filled it! The boot was stacked full, the backseat jammed packed and the front passenger seat also utilised! We are organising the Night Van to come and collect the warm clothing, but as you can see below from our photo, Margaret and Mary from the Calwell St Vincent de Paul chapter were blown away by our donations. The pantry for people in need is definitely now full!
Have a great week!
FIRST EUCHARIST - ENROLLMENTS CLOSE MONDAY 25 JULY
Enrollment is for Catholic students in Year 5
Use the Qkr! App
Search for “South Tuggeranong” and our parish logo will show.
Create a Profile using your child’s name.
Add a debit/credit card
Select “First Eucharist Enrollment”
Information about the Eucharist Program will ONLY be sent out to families that enrolled.
Parent Formation Sessions - Wednesday 27 July OR Thursday 28th July
6.45pm in Holy Family Church
Please contact the parish office if you have any questions or concerns.
tuggeranongsouth.sacraments@cg.org.au
The Clothing Pool Shop will be closed this Thurdsday 21st June 2022 due to unforseen circumstances.
The Clothing Pool shop will be open on Friday 22nd June 2022 as per normal.
Friday - 8:45am - 9:15am
The Clothing Pool is located in the hall foyer. They sell second hand school uniforms and accept donations of good quality pre-loved uniforms. Please bring your donations to the front office.
Please note the Uniform Shop is no longer accepting cash payments.
Payment can be made via the QKR App which is the preferred payment method or you can call into the Office and by via EFTPOS
The Clothing Pool Shop is seeking volunteers, if you are able to assist please contact the front office on 6292 4500
Thank you
