February Newsletter

 Hello to all of our wonderful families and friends. Its February and our year is off and running.

First off- A big Thankyou to Miss Sarah who stepped in as Acting Director while Kelly was away on leave. She did a marvellous job along with our wonderful Cannon Hill team. 

Our children are still settling into their new environments. It can be a little unsettled at the beginning of the year for some children with the change of educators, environments, peers etc but our educators are working hard to assist all children and we ask for your patience and confidence in our skills and strategies during this time.

Due to Covid 19 restrictions, unfortunately we were unable to have our annual parent evening gathering at the beginning of the year. Our educators will be putting together a newsletter for you on EDUCA outlining their goals and aspirations for the year ahead and giving you a run down on what will be happening in the rooms. Please look out for this.

We are hopeful that the easing of restrictions in the next couple of weeks will now allow us to reintroduce many of the fun days and events we have been missing over the past 2 years. We have been carefully working on our 2022 calendar of events and are excited to present this to our parent community. We have missed our gatherings, Discos, Trivia nights and Christmas parties. We want to welcome our families back into the centre!

Fees and Accounts: Please ensure your account is up to date as per our advanced fee policy. Accounts in arrears will unfortunately result in suspension of care until they are back up to date. Please remember to keep immunisations up to date and all of your information up to date with Centrelink as this is one of the main reasons for CCS suspension. When this happens, we find that Centrelink do not always backdate the CCS to the centre, rather they pay the parent. If this happens we need accounts to be corrected immediately once the CCS payment is made to you. Please also remember that if your payments are declining they are incurring an extra $14.95 fee from Debit Success.

Sessions: If you have chosen a session to assist with covering your CCS hours then you must keep your childs attendance within the allocated times. There are fees associated with children being dropped off before and collected after their allocated session times so please ensure you are working within your session times. 

Late Fees: Our centre closes promptly at 6.15pm. Please ensure you are here and have collected your child by this time. Late fees of $1 per minute apply to late collections. Please be mindful that our staff do have families to go home to as well. All late fees are to be paid to the staff on duty who have had to stay back. 

Respect for our staff: Unfortunately, this topic needs to be addressed as we have had some recent incidences of disrespect towards our staff which are not OK. Please know that our team work very hard to try to ensure that our environment, curriculum and interactions are of a high standard. Nobody is perfect and sometimes mistakes happen. Sometimes decisions made are not always the outcome everyone wants. Disrespectful interactions towards staff will not be tolerated. This includes yelling and arguing (on the phone or in person), condescending comments, refusing to talk with certain staff members when they approach and passive aggressiveness. Our staff do not treat our families that way and in return we do not accept or expect to be treated in that manner. 

Lunchboxes: We have seen a lot of lunchboxes coming back into the centre as of late. As we are a centre that provides meals we do not require parents to bring large lunchboxes full of food for the children. We ask that you refrain from this please. Our late afternoon tea after 5pm is designed to be a late afternoon snack and only requires one or two items for the children. We ask parents to pack non refrigerated items for this and place them named in the containers provided in each room's kitchen. They can be in sealed bags or paper bags or even small Tupperware containers. We do not have the capacity to hold lunchboxes in the kitchens and we are finding that some children are starting to refuse the centre meals knowing that they have "snacks" in their lunchboxes. 

Breakfast: Just a reminder that we do not serve breakfast after 7.30am. If your child is arriving at 7.30am or later please ensure they have had their breakfast before coming into the centre.

Staffing 

We would like to welcome 2 new staff members to our team. Daniela is a Diploma qualified multi aged lead educator and Abby comes to us as a school based trainee and is studying her Certificate 3. Please feel free to stop and say hello.

Events

February saw us dress in pink and red to celebrate LOVE on valentines day.

We have also had quite a wet weather event. The early gentle rains were the perfect sensory opportunity for some of our children to experience varying play outdoors. 

Both events made for some cute photos

 Upcoming events:

A final note to everyone to please stay safe and dry in the current weather event. The safety of our families and staff is of the utmost importance. 

Remember : If its Flooded-Forget it!