Dear Families,

I trust you found the opportunity to meet with your child’s class teacher for the parent teacher conversations over the past couple of weeks helpful and reassuring. You may be concerned that due to the disrupted term, your child may not be progressing as expected. Please be reassured, that whilst some content has been condensed, students are responding positively to the pace. As a school we have been prioritising whole school approaches to literacy learning over these past few weeks alongside consistent and predictable expectations and routines. Students are naturally curious and ready to learn when they are well, safe and rested. I encourage you to use the holiday break to just be with your children and enjoy family time together. Let us start Term 2 rested and refreshed.

Our Guidance Officer Robbie Spence, Chappy Jenny and Inclusion Support Teacher, Sally Ainsworth have been supporting parents over the past few weeks at Parent Café held under the Year 1 Building. You will hear more about Parent Café in the future as they have great plans for developing this much needed connection point for our families. I thank our parent representative volunteers for the contribution they also make. Aside from distilling core and relevant communication to the class parents, welcoming new families, supporting the class teacher and organising social get togethers, your parent rep is also a good person to pass on questions, ideas, suggestions to the school leadership team. I encourage you to be proactive and engage with your class parent rep.

As mentioned in my previous newsletter piece and my recent email to parents this week a special PandC meeting has been held to decide on the future governance of our YOSHC service. The decision has been made to put the management of the service to tender.

The conduct of a tender process takes approximately three (3) months from commencement to selection of the provider.

• Two weeks to develop draft tender documentation and for the school to review and approve
• One week for school review and approval
• Four weeks at market
• One week for panel evaluation, negotiations and School signing Licence Agreement (Hire Agreement).
• Additional 42 days for a transfer of a licence of the current service after the application is complete.

Invitation to Offer (ITO) documents are released to the market on the Queensland Government QTenders website at a time agreed between the school and the DoE Procurement Branch. Offerors have approximately 4 weeks timeframe to submit their offer, before the evaluation process commences.

To be eligible to submit an offer, providers must be current members of the department’s Pre‑qualified Panel (PQP), (DETE101234). Until a new approved provider is appointed, the PandC remain the approved provider of YOSHC.

I welcome our new PandC Executive and look forward to working closely together for the betterment of our community. If you have a strong interest in the future direction of our school, I encourage you to consider joining the executive team as a couple of positions remain vacant. To our Prep and Year 1 families, please consider if this might be something for you. We have a wonderful school with great potential. The past and highly active and passionate PandC have funded air-conditioning throughout the classes, extensive playground upgrades and many improvements throughout. Our next big audacious goal is a new school hall that will accommodate the whole school for events and assemblies. You may contact the executive or myself if you are interested yerongasspandc@gmail.com .

Please have a wonderful break when it comes around at the end of next week. Thank you for supporting each other and our school community over this past term. The kind words to staff this term have meant so much.

Eunice Webb
Principal