Hi – my name is Jenny Tucker. I have been a parent at Payne Rd State School for eleven years and am Vice President of the P and C. Leigh Passfield is president of the P and C and her son Zac is starting prep today too.
Firstly I would like to welcome you all into the Payne Road Community.
Welcome to our new principal and welcome back our head of curriculum.
In the 11 years I have been involved with the teachers, staff, students and parents at Payne Rd it has been a pleasure. We are a small school with a very strong focus on fostering a high standard of education for our children and an environment that is nurturing and committed to a strong sense of community.
Our teachers and principal have always worked hard to improve the standard of our children’s education. Our P and C committee here is very strong and we work hard to support the school community. The P and C do this in a number of ways. The P and C meetings are utilised to disseminate information about our children’s schooling and to plan useful ways to support the school community.
As a parent I would encourage you to become part of The Payne Road Community. I invite you to attend our P&C meetings. Our committee meetings are held on the third Thursday of the month and are a wonderful way of staying informed about the school. If you cannot get to the meetings the minutes are posted on our website.
This year our major fundraiser will be the Ashton circus. Ashton Circus comes to Payne Rd and we run a fete on the same day. Once information starts appearing about this, I again encourage you to become involved. There are also lots of other ways to help out – join the team of volunteers in our tuckshop. Shae is our tuckshop Convenor. Help in the classroom, help in our uniform shop, join the music committee, help on the Mothers Day or Fathers Day stall, raffles, sausage sizzles and working bees.
One of the best ways to become part of a community is to volunteer in it.
We all have a lot more choices than we used to – we used to read a newspaper, now we surf the net and read many newspapers; as children we used to play with our neighbors, now our kids can play games with kids on the other side of the world; social media such as Facebook replaces the next door neighbors fence as the place for conversation. With all the choices abounding for our children, I think that the level of SHARED experiences is less – we don’t share the same fence to talk over our problems or even the same newspaper. We share our experiences but I don’t think we share experiences. A feeling of belonging ness goes with shared experiences .
As I have said earlier we have lots of ways you can share experiences – join the P and C, tuckshop, the circus, Mothers Day and Fathers Day stalls and working bees.
During the Gap Storms a few years ago, when destruction was randomly wreaked upon our suburb, our community came together and helped each other recover and rebuild. We all worked together towards a common goal of restoring The Gap to the beautiful suburb it is. We were much more of a community after the Gap Storms than we were before.
Volunteering brings people together. By sharing an experience you build relationships and form a network of support and contact. We don’t need terrible events such as the Gap Storms to get to know each other.
I encourage you to volunteer and all get involved in the things that happen at Payne Road State School and help build our community into an even stronger one. You will get to know the parents of your kids friends, you will make friends, you will be helping to provide a better resourced education for your kids and I guarantee you will enjoy it.
I welcome you once again into our community and hope over the coming year I get to know you, and share experiences with you.