P&C News

I received this exciting message from Julie Wilkes, President of our P&C:

I am very excited (and a little nervous) to announce we have been successful in obtaining $9000 funding from the Australian Governments Diversity and Social Cohesion Program! This is absolutely fabulous, and hopefully will be a wonderful project for our school to increase cultural understanding and parent involvement. For those who are not familiar with the project, below is an excerpt from our application on what we plan to do and achieve:

• The project builds on the Harmony Day theme. THPS has a Harmony Day lunch every year where each child brings in an item from home for everyone to share. With such a diverse and interesting school population, the range of food is incredible and no-one wants to miss out. The children are also encouraged to dress in their national costume, which also brings something special to the event. The Harmony Day lunch results in the greatest parent involvement and highest parent attendance of any school event. Both children and parents clearly love the occasion.

• To build on this involvement, the THPS P&C would like to collect recipes of the foods parents have prepared for the Harmony Day lunch. Parents will also be asked questions about their families, nationality and the foods they cook at home. The parent interviews and recipes will be printed and distributed to students at the school over the course of the year. A recipe binder will be supplied to each family to allow collection of the printed interviews/recipes for all to make at home. When an interview and recipe is released, the THPS P&C canteen will have the item available the following week for students and staff to try.

• The aim of the project is to increase parent involvement and participation at THPS, particularly that of parents from diverse cultures or lower socio-economic families. It is a way to involve parents with limited English but who still want to contribute in some way to the school environment. It will also enhance the children's self-esteem - sharing their background and their parents' skills with the wider school community. Through this increased involvement, children's needs will be addressed in a more representative manner. With a sustained increase in parental involvement children's educational outcomes will be positively affected, with improvement in standardised test results.

As from next term we will need to think about how practically we are going to go about producing the recipe cards, and how we think they will best be distributed. I look forward to all your suggestions.

This is an exciting announcement and I encourage everyone to get involved.