Principal's Message: 2 December 2022

Dear families,


What a marvelous night it was for our Arts Spectacular. The weather played nice and it was a great return to a night that has been a part of St Mary’s for a long time.  Our children were beautiful and you can tell they certainly love an audience!

 

There wouldn’t be many of us who can believe we have 2 weeks to go of the 2022 school year, There is still so much to do!


This week we welcomed small groups of our new preps who got to spend some time in their new classrooms with their 2023 teachers. There was a shared excitement from parents, children and of course, from Miss A and Miss B. I’m not exactly sure who was most excited, but I can make a fairly accurate guess!


Next week I will be announcing some staffing changes for next year.



2023 Fees and Levies


After keeping increases at bay over the last 3 years, we have had to increase our fees and some levies by a larger margin for 2023. 

The Summary and payment information can be found here.


Without going into too much detail, you may know that as a Catholic School, we receive some Government funding, but not the same value given to public schools. The gap is what Catholic/private schools need to cover and this is covered by fees charged. This gap is called the CtC (Capacity to Contribute), and this varies from school to school. The gap was previously determined by our suburb's SES (Socio-Economic Status) and has this year been replaced by DMI (Direct Measure of Income). The former measure took into account the suburb one lived in whereas the DMI is based on the actual financial data of parents/guardians at the school. 

In short, the DMI essentially tells schools how much they could/should be charging.

After meeting with our business manager, he showed me that over the years, we have not charged the full gap payment, nor have we increased fees enough to reduce this gap. As a result, our overall funds continue to deplete each year. While we cannot fully bridge this gap this year, we need to try to ensure this gap doesn't continue to widen. 

Therefore, our family fee will increase by $114 to $1736. This is a 7% increase. It won't close the gap that has accumulated, but it will cover the increase that has come as a result of the change to how the gap is calculated this year.

Our curriculum levies will remain unchanged, while other costs have increased minimally to ensure events are fully covered (eg swimming and camps)

For reference, here are the fee increases that took place over the last 5 years (please note there were also curriculum levy increases. These have not been included here:

  • 2019:  $50
  • 2020:  $25
  • 2021: $0
  • 2022: $47


In comparison to our local Catholic primary schools, our fees are still much lower, despite our DMI index being higher or equal to theirs. 

As has always been the case, we encourage any families finding fee payment difficult to come and make an appointment and make arrangements that work for their individual family circumstances.


Religious Education Curriculum review


MACS are seeking stakeholder input into a review currently being undertaken on the Religious Education (RE) Curriculum in Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Melbourne. The Review is being led by Ms Netina Giacco, Professor John Haldane and Professor Gerard O’Shea.

A crucial part of this review is learning from the perspectives of school parents. To gather that input, I warmly encourage you to complete a survey on RE in Catholic schools.

The survey can be accessed and completed via this link: https://onlinesurvey.cecv.catholic.edu.au/surveys/2022-RE-Curriculum-Review-Survey  

The survey questions are broad and open-ended, in order to allow you to provide as much or as little input as you feel appropriate. You can complete it with any, and varying, level of detail - as you see fit. 

Contribution to the survey will be anonymous, although the survey does request some demographic information about you, in order to contextualise results.

In acknowledging the challenges and pressures on everyone at this time of year, the deadline for responses has been set to 20 December 2022.

I am grateful for your assistance and support in this important work.



Wishing you a wonderfully sunny weekend,





Respect • Responsibility • Resilience • Courage