18 May 2020
Hello again and welcome to term 2 week 4.
This is the second week of the planned Phase 1 return to face to face schooling for our students. It has been an absolute rollercoaster for all concerned and I thank you for your patience and support of our school. While week 4 will unfold as per week 3, in week 5 (25th May) we could see more changes, which might go as far as having all students returned to school every day, in as normal as possible circumstances. I will give you the details as soon as I get them and if the situation changes, I will let you know as soon as I can.
Our Secondary Principals Association President is in talks with the Premier and senior officials and we expect an update by the Minister for Education later this week. I am very sorry I cannot give you hard and fast information yet. I don’t like being inconclusive and appreciate the stress this puts everyone under, but that is the situation we are in and we have to roll with it.
Once face to face classes recommence, the advice we currently have is that any families who wish to continue to keep children at home are able to do so. This information is especially important for students with compromised immune systems.
Thank you for your patience. It is a very challenging situation when the decisions from above change without much notice. But that’s the nature of this world wide crisis and while frustrating, it’s totally understandable and very positive for our state and country that we are making a return to normality sooner rather than later. Originally, in NSW, we were told to prepare for online learning for possibly the whole of term 2. This changed to a 4 phased return with juniors 1 day and week and seniors 2 days. Now we are halfway through 2 weeks of phase 1, which was to be 3-4 weeks long before moving to phase 2, however the current thoughts from politicians and senior Department of Education personnel is that we will soon move straight to full return of all students. Please don’t be concerned that some schools have reportedly returned seniors for more than 2 days already. Some of these schools are playing catch up because they closed down operations several weeks before the end of term 1. Others might have seniors in every day, but only for a couple of hours each day.
You may have already heard that the HSC exams will be delayed one week this year. No student will be disadvantaged by this pandemic and measures will be put in place by the Board of Studies to ensure our students can show their true abilities on these exams. Universities are already putting alternative selective procedures in place to ensure that students wanting to undertake tertiary studies next year will be able to do so. More on that as information comes to us.
I’m sure we are all looking forward to returning to normal operation as soon as possible. Teachers and support staff have been doing a tremendous job preparing, delivering and reviewing work for students and supporting their academic achievement and wellbeing from a distance. Families are working diligently under difficult conditions to support our kids and the students themselves have put in a really great effort overall.
Well done everyone. I’ll get back to you once I have more certainty about week 5 and beyond.
Kind regards,
Sandra Rosner