School Covid Updates:

Welcome back to term 2. We hope that this term we will be heading back to a more normal environment with the lifting of certain restrictions.

As you may be aware mask wearing mandate will cease in WA as of 12:01am on Friday. Mask wearing will only be required (for 12 years of age and over) on public transport, ride-share (Taxis, Uber), hospitals and nursing homes. They will not be mandated for schools, however if you wish to continue to wear your mask please do so.

Close contact rules have been changed and the new definition is as follows:

• a household member [or intimate partner] of a person with COVID-19 who has had contact with them during their infectious period,

• someone who has had close personal interaction with a person with COVID-19 during their infectious period, where they spent greater than 4 hours of cumulative contact with them in a residential setting, (i.e. a home, accommodation facility) where masks have been removed by both people for all of this period

• someone who is directed by WA Health that they are a close contact.

For schools, this means a child will no longer be identified as a close contact at school. Parents have been asked to contact the school if their child becomes COVID-19 positive or becomes a close contact and is required to isolate. We can then provision remote learning for students as, or if required.

Any child who becomes symptomatic should stay home and be tested for COVID-19. Please refer to healthywa.wa.gov.au for information on close contact definition, testing and isolation requirements.

We communicate and connect with our families in the following main ways:

Newsletter & Website: For whole school level information and resources.

Class Dojo: For whole school messages and individual classroom communication and feedback between teachers and parents eg. upcoming events, daily messages and reminders, individual parent contact and remote learning information and resources when needed. Every parent was sent a note home to join their child's Class DOJO, if you did not receive one please contact the teacher.

Google Classroom: Year 4-6 already do many interactive learning tasks online, submitting their assigned work, working with other class members, receiving instructions and feedback from their teacher and accessing a range of learning resources. The Year 5&6 students have remote access to this resource already and are very used to working online. The Year 4 students will need a little time to learn the process, however their teachers' online classrooms will be available should remote learning occur.