Parents Newsletter 16th September 2022
Dear Parents
Many thanks to you all for helping to make sure we have had a very smooth return to school. The children are well settled back into school already and from Monday our new Junior Infants will be in for a full day and will finish at 1.30. The school lunches are hugely popular with the children and the benefits are already there to be seen. I spoke with the children from 1st – 6th classes in assemblies on Thursday about lunches / healthy food, about wearing their school uniform and, most important of all, about attendance. With your cooperation, we aim to make improvements in all 3 of these areas in the coming months.
Thanks again for all of your support
Denis Coleman
Principal
DEIS – Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools
From September the 1st this year, we were included in the DEIS programme for schools. We have been able to appoint a new Home School Coordinator – Ms Deirdre McDermott. We have appointed extra support teachers and we now provide a hot lunch every day for every child at no cost to you the parents !! There are many other supports that our school / our families can benefit from – I will keep you up to date as these become available. These supports are designed to benefit all of the children in the school.
We have started work already on a DEIS Plan to look at key areas within our school that will need new approaches and new interventions. I will be in touch in the coming weeks with parents to ask for your views / suggestions and to give you a clearer idea of our plan.
Attendance
In our DEIS Plan, a key priority will be attendance. We have a large number of children who attend almost every day for the full day – this school year, we want to be able to say this about every child.
‘Every Day Counts’ – you will hear this repeated over the course of the year. If your child is in school every day and for all of the day, you are giving them a great chance to achieve their potential – to be as good as they can be. Sometimes parents collect a child early for a dentist or doctor appointment, which is fine, however, we shouldn’t have early collections, from now on, for anything other than appointments
Over the last two years, I encouraged parents to keep their child at home if they felt unwell. Our staff regularly contacted parents to come to the school to collect a child because they had a cough – these were very difficult times for everybody. As a result, children missed large numbers of days in the last 2 years. This year, our plan is to bring our attendance levels back up to a much higher level – we can only do this with your cooperation.
Healthy Bodies = Healthy Minds
We are all delighted with our school kitchen this year and the fabulous school lunches, packed with healthy food, that is provided every day. The App is very easy to use and I have encouraged the children to make sure ‘Food is ordered on Fridays’ for the following week. If you have any difficulties in relation to our school lunches, please get in touch – if we can’t sort it ourselves then we will get in touch with the staff in the kitchen. I have spoken with the children this week in relation to healthy food choices – we ask you to send water in as their drink and to leave any ‘treats’ (chocolate, crisps, biscuits etc) for home. Again, we ask for your cooperation with our approach to Healthy Eating.
School Uniform / Tracksuit top
Our school uniform has many benefits – it is designed to make life easier for parents in the morning and to bring a sense of belonging to all of the children in our school. This is very good training for secondary school also. Please help us to make sure every child is wearing plain navy tracksuit bottom and white polo top with their school tracksuit top. Grey trousers / skirt / pinafore is to be worn with the uniform. Thanks again for your cooperation.
