With the ongoing issues with COVID on the mainland it is important that we continue to maintain good habits to keep everyone safe.  Please continue to sign in via the QR codes across the school if you are entering the school buildings, including your child’s classroom.  We will ensure that students have ongoing access to sanitiser and that they use good hand hygiene to keep themselves as safe as possible.  I must reinforce the need for parents and carers to keep your child/ren home if they are unwell or showing flu like symptoms as I have to with my staff.  Thank you for your cooperation with this very important shared responsibility.

We enjoyed an exceptionally professional performance of Grease by Launceston College students at the Princess Theatre last Wednesday.  The entire event was a real positive for all of our students and staff and reaffirmed our understanding of our students’ capacity to ‘Be Their Best’ with both their public and audience behaviour.  To be able to take such a large group out on mass and for the process to be problem free is very affirming for all. 

As part of our excursion, we saw all our students in uniform.  What this tells us is that students have a uniform and are choosing when they wear it.  We are expecting that all our students are in uniform each day.  This certainly is true about our inter school sports days too.  Our students look part of a team due to their consistent uniform and it helps identify us as individuals and as a group. 

We had a very positive sports days on Friday with our Year 7-10 students playing at Scottsdale across Netball, AFL and Soccer.  The feedback from staff again identified our students’ ability to show great sportsmanship and playing skill across the day.  Our 5-6 sports stars were equally impressive at South George Town Primary with their positive approach and commitment during the matches that they played and were also encouraging and supportive of others.  This feedback is a great measure of our culture and one we should be proud of.

I wanted to reiterate the message that there is a clear statewide policy in place regarding mobile phones at and during school.  The message is still “Off and Away all day!” Phones are not an essential component for learning and should not be out at all during the day.  For any of our primary students the clear rule is that phones should be signed into the office upon your arrival at school and retrieved at the end of the day.

Thank you to all of you who made the time to come in and discuss your child’s learning with teachers.  Our Parent teacher discussions are a critical component to ensuring that formative and summative feedback is being heard and received by all of those involved in the learning partnership. If you haven’t been able to organise a meeting, I would strongly encourage you to ring and at least talk to your child’s teacher – we can all improve irrespective of where we are currently at.

We have a lot happening at Lilydale particularly in the next fortnight.  We had tree planting happening late last week and we will have AFL Tas representatives coming out this week to work with our students.  Science week will happen from the 16-20 August with a range of activities for various grades and we were successful in securing the Young Tasmanian Scientist program to work at our school.

Finally, I would like to congratulate Alana Lava who has been successful in winning a position as Assistant Principal at Punchbowl Primary School in an acting capacity for the remainder of the year.  Whilst Alana’s skills and expertise will be a loss for Lilydale, we are excited for her as she pursues her career, and we wish her all the best for a smooth transition into her new school and her new role.  We will advise her successor as soon as the process has been finalised.

Colin Pearson – Principal