Kapunda Primary School Newsletter

Term 4 is proving to be a busy term, filled with class, community and school events. Thank you to our hardworking staff and dedicated parent volunteers for ensuring these events can happen, which have included:

• Commencement of Kindy transition visits
• Students representing school at Kapunda RSL Remembrance Day service
• Year 5/6 Parliament House Excursion
• Room 11 excursion to Oz Asia Festival
• Year 1 and 1/2 excursion to Pevan and Sarah at Starplex

2022-2024 Site Improvement Plan

The school improvement planning process aims to make sure all SA public schools apply a consistent approach to, and implementation of, the improvement cycle. There are five steps of the improvement cycle:

1. Analyse and prioritise: Analyse evidence of student learning and answer the question, ‘What are our goals for improvement?’
2. Determine challenge of practice: Consider how improvements in teaching practice will help achieve    goals for improvement and answer the question, ‘What areas of practice should we focus on improving, to reach our goals?’
3. Plan actions for improvement: Consider evidence of best practice to answer the question, ‘What actions should we take to improve our practice and reach our goals?’ This involves specifying a timeline, responsibilities and resources needed for each action, and the success criteria that will give confidence the actions are having an impact on student learning.
4. Improve practice and monitor impact: Implement the planned actions for improvement and meet regularly to monitor your impact by answering the question, ‘What evidence do we have that we are making progress towards our improvement goals?’ Then adjust your actions as required to maximise impact on student learning.
5. Review and evaluate: Review the impact and cost effectiveness of your actions for improvement and answer the questions, ‘Have we achieved our improvement goals? What have we learned and what are our next steps?’ 

We will be sharing with the school community our updated SIP shortly.

2024 Staffing News

I'm pleased to announce that Sharon Okmasich has been appointed Principal at Kapunda Primary School for Term 1, 2024. Sharon is the current Curriculum Lead in the Gawler 1 Portfolio and was previously Principal at Mallala Primary School. Sharon will be visiting us shortly and is excited to be joining the KPS community. Please join me in welcoming Sharon to Kapunda Primary School.

Department of Education HR staff have worked with me to identify and fill contract positions as early as possible. Whilst we still have 2 contract teacher positions to fill, having almost all our contract teacher positions filled at this stage of the year has been welcome as it allows us to confirm many aspects of our classroom and support structures for the new year.

I’m pleased to announce that Amalie Meaney and Melissa Ryan have been appointed to contract teaching positions for 2024. It is great that both Amalie and Melissa are able to continue working with us.

The panel for the Student Wellbeing position will be completed soon with an announcement of the successful candidate within the next fortnight.

2024 Materials and Service Charges

Following community consultation, Governing Council at the Week 4 meeting approved the motion that: ‘For the 2024 school year, the Kapunda Primary School Governing Council approves a proposed 2024 Materials and Services Charges amount of $320’.

As the materials and services charge is greater than the legislated prescribed amount, as referenced in the Education and Children’s Services Act, the Governing Council is required to undertake a poll to gain majority support from the school community for this proposed charge to be compulsory and therefore recoverable in full.

Access to an online poll was sent to families on 9th November and closed 23rd November.

Updated Uniform Policy

I’m pleased to announce that consultation with all stakeholders (students, staff and parents) has been completed and an Updated Uniform Policy will be taken to Governing Council in Week 8 for endorsement. I would like to thank Megan McWaters, Irena O’Reilly, Georgia Tydeman, Tess Vogt and Annie Crowhurst for the time they have given in helping to update the policy. They also helped enormously with the implementation of the new KPS Polo top.

Sun Safety

With the weather warming up, it’s a timely reminder that all in accordance with our UV policy it is all students need to wear hats at recess, lunch and when lessons are held outside in accordance with our UV Policy. We encourage students to also wear hats to and from school, however many students like to keep their hats in their classroom trays for organisational purposes.  A good system is to have a spare hat that students keep in their bag that they can wear when walking to and from school (particularly at 3:10pm when the UV rating is at its highest!)

Students without a hat are only able to play indoors (gym, library) or they must sit under building shade.  Suitable hats are slouch hats or legionnaire hats only in a navy blue colour. Hats are available for purchase from our front office.

We encourage families to apply sunscreen on their children before coming to school.  All classes have sunscreen and teachers encourage students to reapply at recess and lunch times.

Kind regards,

David Pitt

Principal

Please note that these dates are subject to change

On Friday November 17 the annual Barossa Valley Combined Primary Schools Concert Band Workshop took place.  At the Nuriootpa Soldier’s Memorial Hall, the Nuriootpa and Kapunda High School music students joined forces to mentor primary school instrumental music students from Nuriootpa, Tanunda, Kapunda and Angaston Primary schools.

The students, ranging from year 5 to year 12, spent the morning preparing repertoire such as Funky Town, La Bamba, Smoke on the Water and Spiderman, for a concert. This super band of approximately 100 students performed 10 songs to an audience of around 200 people, which included our IEC students, only hours later.

The annual concert was organised and compered by DfE Instrumental Music Woodwind specialist Sonia Samain. Our team of IM teachers worked with these young musicians too, Jacob Staehr (Brass), Chris Yeend (Percussion/Drums), Tim Hogan (Guitar), Megan Fishers (Vocals)and NHS classroom music teachers Shelley Parker, Sarah Wensley and Noah Tilley.  Classroom music teacher Carolyn Thorne joined us from Kapunda HS as did Tanunda PS Performing Arts teacher, Emily Hewitt and musician/NHS SSO, Sonya Abdelmalek. The Nuriootpa Staff Band “One Detention” also performed a Beatles classic ‘Got to Get you Into My Life’, as well as Burno Mars classic ‘Uptown Funk’ and one of the hits from the 2023 Barbie movie, ‘Dance the Night.’

Through this performance opportunity students gained the skills to perform in a much larger ensemble, grow their confidence on their instrument as well as meet new like- minded students/musicians.