Principal's Message
Athletics Carnival - An Open Letter to Parents
The athletics carnival last week was a wonderful event. Our students (and staff) clearly needed a fun, community event to take the focus off COVID-19 and away from the constant media attention on the pandemic. Students were fully engaged, attendance was great, records were being broken and parents were keeping to the ‘do not attend’ request. That is until lunch time, and this is where the letter commences.
Straight off the bat I have to say “Our messaging needs to be much better than it was”. A Facebook notification was all that was used to alert parents to the rule that parental visits to the carnival were not permitted. And while Social Media can be a fantastic medium, everyone here at the College needs to realise that not all parents use it as a regular source of information. Hand on heart - that is our fault. There are already plans in place to rectify this for future events.
That being said, it was very upsetting and very concerning when a large number of parents (read here: grand-parents, aunts and uncles, carers etc) turned up at lunch time and afterwards with bags of food for their children. Our discomfort levels as legal carers of our students during a school carnival went through the roof. And an explanation of why this is not an over-reaction follows below.
All institutions (including schools) during this time are required to have a COVID-Safe plan in place to ensure that collection of names and contact details for visitors at any given time can be produced on demand from a NSW Government Health official or the police. Given that the carnival is an outdoor event with no clear entry and exit points it was determined that parental visits would not be allowed. That is also in line with NSW Department of Education and Catholic Schools NSW guidelines which say parental visits should be limited to only those times when absolutely required or emergencies.
Keeping parents away, then, had two purposes:
- Ensuring our students were not going to be potentially engaging with adults or other visitors not of their family.
- Ensuring that we kept in line with NSW Government and CSNSW regulations for schools in relation to parental visits.
We are all keenly aware of the situation in Victoria at the moment. And further to that, it is obvious that outbreaks in Sydney have been almost 100% attributed to visitors from the southern state. What I am almost certain of, too, is that people would be fully aware that during the school holidays, our camping grounds, van parks, motels and apartments up and down the mid-north coast were full of vehicles with Victorian number plates and many visitors from Sydney. While this cash injection was a welcome relief for the proprietors of those venues and the community as a whole, the heightened risk of infection into our beautiful part of NSW is increasingly likely to follow that of the outbreaks in Sydney over the last fortnight.
The outbreaks in the Crossroads Hotel and Thai Rock Restaurant were caused by people who were asymptomatic - they didn’t know they had it when they entered those establishments. How many visitors to our coast in the last two weeks have been exactly the same? How many in our College community, including parents, have come into direct or indirect contact with them or places they have visited? For me, as the leader of the College whose prime responsibility is to ensure the safety of our young people, that is a risk far too great for my comfort.
And there are severe penalties in place for businesses (and schools) who do not enforce a proper COVID-Safe plan:
- “Any business found in breach of the Public Health Orders could face a penalty of up to $55,000 and a further $27,500 penalty may apply for each day an offence continues. On-the-spot fines can also be issued.” (NSW Department of Health - Public Health Orders and restrictions)
On that day, if a NSW Health official or police officer turned up and saw that students had been visited by parents to deliver food, and they then subsequently ordered the College to produce a contact list of parents who visited the carnival, we simply would not have been able to comply and would have potentially faced the fines listed above, possibly even multiples of those fines for each instance we could not account for. If the fines are indeed applied for each offence, it is possible that those fines could have exceeded the College’s entire budget for disability education-support, just as an example.
Further, I know that many parents have said or implied, “but I did the right thing - I social-distanced when I delivered”. And this may be the case for you, but how do I guarantee that every parent did this? I cannot, which is why the parental ‘non-attendance rule’ was in place. Others said, “how is this different to me bringing food to school?” The answer is, of course, that visitations to school are closely monitored and recorded. Interactions with students are kept strictly in line with guidelines and a register of all visitors is maintained. At school, a parent cannot visit a student unless they notify the office, sign-in and register their details on a list for the College to produce on demand if required.
Outside of those potential fines, if, for example, the community were alerted to an outbreak tomorrow within the College, and NSW Health asked me to help contact-trace anyone who was in attendance on the day, I cannot do that effectively. That is a huge and unacceptable unknown for the College and community health.
And, of course, most students undertook this practice by using their mobile phones in contravention of College policy, which is there for a reason, so that we can (attempt to) ensure that they are not doing the wrong thing, and blindly making contact with people in a manner that is not acceptable. This is why I wrote about mobile phone use in the final newsletter last term.
One group I feel most sorry for are those parents (especially of Year 12) who stayed away and missed what for some might be their last athletics carnival.
What this incident has done, has to ensure and encourage us to tighten our policies and procedures around sporting carnivals. Parental involvement (when it returns post-COVID) is vital and most welcome. In many instances we cannot run carnivals and other events without your support. But it must happen with the best interests of all of our students at front of mind.
Again, I go back to my first point - Our Messaging Needs to be Much Better Next Time. And it will, but what will also be better are the guidelines around parental interaction on special days like carnivals so that parents don’t inadvertently do the wrong thing and find themselves having the finger pointed where it could have been avoided.
Our Facebook page lit up with people criticising and blaming each other needlessly. Our Social Media platforms are not intended for that and I ask that parents refrain from this moving forward. It is not helpful and goes against our intention to come together to be a supportive community. I wrote earlier in the year about COVID, that what will really matter when we come out of this is ‘How We Treat Each Other’. Jesus teaches us that Love Will Prevail.:
“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.
But the greatest of these is love.” 1 Corinthians 13
Love each other and we will get through this together as one.
God Bless
Kevin Lewis BEd (Syd) MEd (ACU) GradCertRe (Uon)
College Principal
kevin.lewis@lism.catholic.edu.au