Welcome to our 2025 Student Leaders!

On Monday, we congratulated and awarded badges to our School Captains, House Captains and Vice Captains, Band and The Arts Captains, Indigenous Ambassador and Environmental Ambassadors at our School Leader Investiture. We are excited to work with our student leadership team as they represent our students and super importantly support our students to participate and enjoy school life. I encouraged all students to say hello to our leaders when they see them around the school and have a chat with them about any problems they are having or any ideas for our wonderful school. We know that these students are excellent listeners, and also want the very best for our community.

Our Student Council representatives, elected by their own classmates, were also inducted. Our Student Council, made up of the class representatives including our school captains and our Indigenous and Environmental Ambassadors, collect ideas and listen to the student voice from their elected classes to bring ideas and feedback to the Student Council. This group then makes decisions about how to help our students, our school and our community.

We look forward to a productive and harmonious year as these students guide our student body demonstrating their responsibility and kindness!

Welcome to our new staff!

We have welcomed a couple of new staff this year:

We are excited to introduce Louise Bishell, an experienced teacher who has joined us as one of our Year 4 teachers. Some words from Louise:

Thank you so much Dayboro for the very warm welcome. I have been teaching children from Kindergarten to Year 2 for a number of years and have done so in Darwin through to Canberra, and many places in between. I am excited to branch out and take on Year 4 this year with my very enthusiastic and engaged learners in 4L. I look forward to meeting more families around the school as I merge into the wonderful Dayboro State School team.

We also welcome Justine Deakin, our Guidance Officer working at Dayboro on Thursdays. Justine has links already to our community and wonderful school. Kathryn McGrath, our new Speech Language Pathologist, has worked at Dayboro previously. We are super excited to welcome Kathryn back.

Our Business Manager role is filled by two part-time officers. Clare Gault has of course been attached to Dayboro for a long time and returned from maternity leave last year. This year Clare will share the role with Angie Conoplia, also an experienced business manager.

Dayboro State school Explicit Improvement Agenda for 2025

Prior to school recommencing, our committed staff participated in professional learning. Part of this involved collaboration to review our 2024 DSS performance data, celebrating our successes, and to continue planning towards what is possible for 2025.  We also spent some time at the end of last year looking at our community response, both parents and students in our School Opinion Survey, to analyse what the community identify as our strengths here at Dayboro SS and what areas we could strengthen.

From this professional collaboration and data analysis, we have drafted our Explicit Improvement Agenda for 2025 which we believe supports all of our students to be engaged and successful:  

Precision in the Teaching of Reading in AC English (V9) promoting Student Engagement

We have also commenced drafting our Annual Implementation Plan (AIP) to outline our goals as identified through key focus areas discussed by staff and community as needing prioritisation, aligning to our school’s strategic plan.

We share our two Key Priorities at our first P&C meeting, on Monday evening and are seeking feedback on the actions and strategies we will use to achieve these priorities. Our 2025 Dayboro State School Key Priorities are:

• To implement a whole school approach to the Teaching of Reading while implementing the Australian Curriculum (Version 9) in English.
• To promote positive student engagement in learning through a whole school approach to behaviour.

Our staff are engaged in two working parties to work towards achieving these key priorities and as such, are currently working on the strategies required to achieve these goals, and of course ways to measure our effectiveness. As we develop our 2025 budget, we will be focussing on the resources we will use to achieve these goals.

If you would like to provide feedback, please contact me at gdoug7@eq.edu.au.

Connecting to our community!

We will hold our Class Information Sessions for parents this afternoon to assist you in understanding the organisation of your child/ren’s classroom. If you do need to bring your children with you, you can drop them up to our school library while you attend the class session/s. Please note the following arrangement for the afternoon:

- Parents must drop off and collect from the library

- Playgrounds are out of bounds for all of our community during the sessions

- Attending children will need to bring a water bottle with them as we have no food and drink available in the library

- Year 5 and 6 students are welcome to attend the session with their parents.

Thanks for continuing to foster this partnership with your child’s teacher in your child/ren’s education!

School Calendar

School Calendar

Please find attached our latest version (V3) of our Parent Calendar to support you to stay informed about all of our school events. 

National Assessment Program Literacy and Numeracy NAPLAN Year 3 and 5 students this term

A reminder that the annual NAPLAN testing for Year 3 and 5 students occurs in term 1, with our testing window scheduled from 12 March through to 24 March. These assessments are delivered online with the exception of Year 3 Writing. The students are assessed in the following areas:

• Writing
• Reading
• Conventions of Language
• Numeracy

Please see below the information brochure for parents and carers. You can also access the NAPLAN website www.nap.edu.au/naplan. If you have any questions or concerns about these assessments, please contact your child’s class teacher, Karen Ryan and myself so that we can discuss or clarify details.

Our Fabulous P&C

A huge shout out to our P&C team. What a great end of last year with community events like our festive Christmas Disco. Our P&C regularly bring to our meetings ideas and questions about the school organisation and learning structure to help our staff understand the community needs and wants. When we are making decisions about our school, we consult our P&C as representatives of our parents.

Would you like to help our school to partner with parents and respond to the community’s needs? Why don’t you join us for our next P&C meeting 10 March 6:30pm following our AGM. We meet at the school and also have a Teams meeting option.

Our next meeting will commence with the annual AGM, we will be electing our new committee members. Our current committee has been amazing at collaborating and supporting community. This group is super welcome and so dedicated to making Dayboro SS a great place for all of our students and community.

All welcome! Please like the DSS P&C Facebook page for more details.

Away for the day

As established in 2024, all Queensland state school students must keep their mobile phones switched off and ‘away for the day’ during school hours. As soon as students arrive at school, all students with a mobile phone are required to turn their phone off and hand it in to their teacher or lower school students to the office. Students then collect their phones at 3:00pm.

As outlined in our Student Code of Conduct, smart watches and other devices may be worn, but notifications, must be switched off so that phone calls, messages and other notifications cannot be sent or received during school hours. It is important that students who do wear a wearable device know how to turn those notifications off. This includes during lesson times and break times, as well as other school activities including excursions, camps, sporting events, etc.

As usual, if parents need to communicate with their children during the school day, this will be facilitated through the school office. Thanks for helping your child/ren understand these important restrictions.

Have a great week!
Gabrielle