Friday, 2 March 2018

Home and School Annual Report 2018


St Josephs Home and School Chairpersons Report for 1st March 2018
I am pleased to be able to present this report for our 2018 AGM.
I only took over the chairperson’s position on the 31 May 2017 and I really just threw myself in at the deep end. It has been a great way to get to know all the teachers at our school not just my children’s ones and become more involved with how things work within the school as a whole not just the small boundaries of my children’s individual classes.
The Home and School works very hard during the year to raise funds for our students and school. And we are always on the lookout for new ways to raise funds that do not expect just the school families to be putting their hand in their pockets. In saying that as a Home and School we expect every family within our school to get behind our fundraising efforts to help make them the success we want them to be.  The end result is every child in our school benefits from all that we do.
Before I took over we had the successful installation of the new hall heaters and this was our major contribution for the year. These have been working wonderfully and the cool air conditioning was brilliant at the summer discos that we had.  We also supplied Bibles to all our new entrants this year.  With help from a wonderful committee we were able to pull together the first major event on the calendar for myself as the chair. Luckily for me, Megan Phillips had all we needed to know stored away in her amazing memory and with help from the rest of the committee we managed to pull off a very successful International Food Fair. We sold a total of 820 plates of food and 58 Cakes which was up from the previous year. This resulted in a profit of $6000 for the Home and School. We have made a very big note for ourselves that this year we need to up the amounts of food for all stalls as we sold out very early.
My next challenge was the junior school disco, having been a parent dropping children at the junior disco in the past I did notice one thing, the children didn’t really dance they just ran around. So this year we approached the disco a little differently and requested parents dropped their children off and left.  We had only 1 person operating the music, the lighting was not to be tampered with and we gave the children a clear set of rules at the very beginning of the evening, the main one being no running around only dancing. We then set about teaching the children how to dance which involved committee members and a couple of the parent helpers getting out on the dance floor and dancing with the kids. This worked brilliantly and our wonderful principal who said she was only pocking her head in for a quick visit ended up dancing the night away with the kids until the very end - well done Lorraine.
We then produced another wonderful evening for our senior leavers. With Adele’s amazing organisation skills in the kitchen we served a lovely Red Carpet themed leaving dinner for our year 8 students. They were then joined later by the year 7 students for a dance and finished with supper. Thank you to all the team who helped pull this together.
During the school holidays Rebecca Meek and myself then started with the challenge of putting together the Whitestone Wipe Out event that we will be holding in April. This involved a lot of walking and discussion on how the menfolk will be able to pull off the varying obstaclea that we had on our wish list. This has evolved and we are getting down Facebook page has been very well taken care of by Sam from Nudge Marketing.
So as for the year to come for fundraising, the committee has decided to let the Whitestone Wipe Out happen before we make any firm decisions on what other events or fundraising ideas we will be running alongside the International food fair.
I would like to personally acknowledge the help our wonderful Megan Phillips has given me and making it possible for me to be able to coordinate the events having had no involvement with the Home and School prior to becoming the chair. Without Megan it really would have been a very stressful time and she has made it so easy to understand how things work.
Adele, now where do I start, we can find you anywhere from the uniform shop, in the kitchen, dressed as a Mexican or scaling down the side of a very very large rock with camera at the ready. Adele is not only fully submerged in the Home and School but literally anywhere help is needed around the school you are truly awesome Adele.
As we all know we also lost a wonderful woman from our Committee and school community with her retirement last year and that was of course the always smiling Jocelyn Marsh. Jocelyn will be very much missed and we will never be truly able to replace our wonderful Jocelyn. She has promised me she will still be a familiar face at our events.
To our treasurer Sherilee thank you for all your work in keeping our books balanced. And to our secretary Suzanne you do a wonderful job I know sometimes our meetings may be just a little confusing to keep up with. Also I need to put a big thank you out to all the husbands that come along and help us with the logistics of setting things up for us.
Finally I would like to thank the whole committee for making me feel so welcome and being such a great bunch of ladies to work with.
Thank you
Rebecca Heffernan

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