Parent Council held their AGM on Monday 17 September. Denise McMillan was elected as Chairperson and Mharai Mayes is the new Secretary.

Date of next meeting is Monday 29 October 7.00pm in Onthank Primary School.

Dear Parent/ Carer,

The Parent Council and school would like to write a joint letter to you about the incident reported in the Kilmarnock Standard this week which happened in April last term. 

Parent Council

The Parent Council has reviewed the incident with EAC and agree with the conclusions that the school acted promptly to locate and retrieve the children concerned. We know and are concerned that this can happen in any school.  However, we are confident that we will all learn from this unfortunate incident to ensure that we limit the possibility of a re occurrence happening again.

School

As a school we have worked with both families to reassure them of how seriously we viewed the matter and feel it is important to protect the anonymity of the children.  As the incident has been reported in the press it is important that you know the relevant information has been given to parents concerned.  At our last Parent Council meeting we reported this Health and Safety incident occurring during a lunchtime and described the actions that have been taken by the local authority and school working together.  We have consulted with the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and Health and Safety team. Already there have been improvements to gates and a new gate has been purchased.   As you are probably aware staff have been monitoring the gates until the new one is fitted.  As a school we have ensured our pupil Health and Safety team have been working with adults and the steps they have introduced include safety circles and safety lines.  Staff speak to the children regularly about the importance of staying within the school grounds for their own safety and about road safety near to the school.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Parent Council and the wider school community for their support and for the work you all do at home to reinforce this important message.  The school and Parent Council continue to work in partnership and have a meeting planned for next week.

If you have any concerns we can discuss them at our weekly Wednesday morning drop in.  I would also like to invite all of our parents and carers to attend a safety talk at the school on Wednesday 30^th May.  We had already scheduled an Online Safety Workshop from 3.15pm to 4.15pm and I can answer any questions you may have about security within the school and our playgrounds at this event.

Yours sincerely,

Scott Thomson (Chair of Parent Council)

Alison Wright (Head teacher)

When you miss school …you miss out!

All parents/carers should have received an attendance print out with their child’s report card.

 We have a number of children who have less than 90% attendance and too many absences recorded as an unauthorised absence (this will appear as a U on the printout).  

For those children with less than 90 % or children with unauthorised absences we would like to speak to you about ways we can work together to improve this. We are hoping this will reduce the percentage of children throughout the school who are below 90%  Please find attached EAC guidelines which maybe of help.  We sent this leaflet with the last newsletter.

SC76 (a) Attendance leaflet

Alison Wright

Please see attached appendices indicating the options for the format of holidays for East Ayrshire schools for academic session 2019-2020.  Parents/Carers are asked which option they prefer. Please complete:

School Holidays – Consultation Paper 2019-2020