Good afternoon Colo High community,
Today our school moved to the second phase of social distancing. Our teachers have moved to a roster where many are delivering lessons from home (while still providing sufficient staff for supervision for the students in attendance).
This further reduces the number of people on site and makes social distancing easier.
It also allows our staff some room to bring in groups of Year 12 so they can continue with compulsory practical tasks and assessment tasks for the HSC.
Tonight, I want to respond to the many parent enquires regarding attendance, work completion and consequences for non work completion.
As you are aware, Colo High School is usually very strict in this space - it is a cornerstone upon we base the outstanding results we all expect and the school delivers.
However, these are NOT normal times and our normal standards cannot apply.
I DO expect every student to engage to the best of their ability with the online learning they are being offered and we will report on student engagement and effort during this time.
However, online learning is NOT school as we know it. Some students will complete the set work quickly and some will not complete a lot in the set time.
Students need to engage - but won’t be disadvantaged because they have difficulty with the new style of learning.
To be specific,
- students who are absent because they are social distancing will have this recorded as ‘flexible learning’ and considered present at school if they are logging in and engaging with the learning offered,
- during this time we will not be making judgements on attendance at either the year 10 or year 12 formal based on attendance,
- we won’t be issuing new ‘n’ award notifications for any other item than scheduled assessments,
- once school returns to something resembling normal then we will begin to apply our normal rules.
At this time, concentrate on your child’s mental heath first, and then their learning. I will talk more about support you might access in this space tomorrow.
Thank you again to everyone for your patience, care and kindness.
We WILL get through this (note subliminal message in the picture from today).
Warm regards,
Mark Sargeant
Principal
