Welcome back to the new school year, we hope you had a wonderful Summer holiday with your family.
The School Board are delighted to inform you that the handover of the Nippers Child Care Centre located at Stargate Shopping Centre, 1/49 Chelmsford Ave, Port Kennedy 6172, has been completed. Over the coming months, you will see a name change and branding of the centre to West Coast Montessori. We will be holding a Parent Education evening for families from the centre, to visit our Kara classroom at the Port Kennedy Primary School site during March. We will showcase how the Prepared Environments at the Early Learning Centre will be transformed. RMS is proud to be able to fully cater for children in the first plane of development and provide more places for our youngest children to gain Montessori experience before joining our Children’s House classes in Rockingham
Over the summer holidays, Go2Homes has been busy at the Rockingham Primary School site with the renovations of the multipurpose area between Penguins and Jellyfish classrooms. Throughout this term, we will see the building work transform this area enabling us to have private areas for specialists to utilise when supporting our children, a meeting space for families and teachers, along with creating a space where the whole staff can come together indoors at the Rockingham site. We expected all the demolition would have occurred during the holiday break however this will last another three weeks and building work will continue for several weeks after that. Staff and children are being resilient, and we have made some alterations to classes to minimise disruptions from the work site. As the demolition work is completed, the builders have informed us the noise will reduce, however, we will monitor to make similar class changes when needed (and we will need to have a fantastic party once it is all done!).
Over the last few weeks of Term 4, we were joined by Nicole Woolf in the HR Payroll officer position and Rebecca Lauderdale in the Marketing Officer position. In January, Evie Thomsen joined the school as the reception/enrolments officer at Port Kennedy. We welcome Nicole, Rebecca and Evie to the RMS team and officially welcome Andrew Evans to the School in his role as Business Manager, even though he has been with us through term 4. This means we once again have a full and growing admin team. We also welcome Sandhia Naidu, our new Well-Being Coordinator and Senior Psychologist.
We are sad to farewell Lisa Wells, Jenny Short and Leo Keith who have resigned from their AP teaching roles and Louise Lawrence from her EA position. These teaching positions have been advertised and we have received an overwhelming international response from Montessori trained AP practitioners. With the easing of visa requirements by the Australian government this has enabled us to recruit globally and we anticipate these positions will be permanently filled over the coming months. We welcome and thank Judy Rippon for stepping into the Manyin advisory role and thank Mark Dove for returning to a full-time teaching role whilst we undertake our recruitment processes. We warmly welcome Scarlett Farrell back from maternity leave and congratulate Kirsty Williams on stepping back into her Program Coordinator role having now returned to full-time work with us. Eunice Hicks will now deliver music at the PK PS site enabling Marie O’Dwyer to work an additional day with her advisory group in the AP. We also welcome Dianne Thomson back to her EA role in the AP after her time away last semester.
At our Rockingham Primary Schools site, we congratulate Ayesha Meer on her appointment to full-time Program Coordinator with Clare McCaskie taking leave this year. We warmly welcome Lee du Toit (Seahorse class), Lani Maher (Dugongs class) and Lauren Ton (Penguins class) to their new teaching roles. We welcome back Deb Dwyer from Long Service Leave and we have seen Kaitlyn Todd move to the Turtles EA role and Lizeth Palomino move to the Sealions EA position. Nurjana Momunkulova has returned to two full days in the Dolphins class and we look forward to Orla Dineen returning to her role in the Rockingham Infant Toddler Program in week 4 this term following her Long Service leave.
I would like to congratulate Jodie Phillips as she moves into the Associate Principal role at the Port Kennedy Primary School site. This appointment has been made possible with the continued growth of enrolments on this site. Carla Darcy has replaced Lizeth Palomino in the Janda class as she returns to her EA role at the Rockingham site.
A very special congratulations to Simmi, Sayantika and Serena who all completed their Montessori Institute 3-6 Diploma at the end of 2023 and to Jenny, Nikki, Martin, Leo and Jade who also completed their AMI 12-18 Diploma at the end of January. This is a huge achievement for you all and a wonderful benefit to our RMS family and the Montessori community.