Happy New Year to all our Galen parents, carers and students!

I trust that you have had a restful and peaceful time over the school summer break.

School will be resuming for all students tomorrow, Thursday 31st January.

As you may have heard, we have had some issues with our IT network over the past 24 hours including our emails. At this stage, our emails are working again and we are continuing to address the other aspects of the problem.

I apologise if anyone has sent an email to Galen in that time and has not received a reply. The particular issue we have been dealing with meant that no emails could come in or out of the school in that time. If this does apply to you can I respectfully request that you re-send the email.

There are a number of areas of our network that are still being assessed for damage and/or are being redressed. These include PAM and SIMON. We are not clear on the timeframe for when these will be operational again but we believe it may not be until the start of next week. I need to stress that all personal data is safe. Naturally, we have sought advice and assistance from the Catholic Education Office as part of our network recovery.

All aspects of ensuring your child’s safety and wellbeing are in place and all classes will run as scheduled. We have hard copies of all student information. We will have hard copy individual timetables for all students when they arrive at school in the morning. Attendance will be manually recorded and will be updated to SIMON/PAM later.

Because PAM is not operating and currently we cannot electronically issue or receive your permission for any off-campus activities, there will be no off-campus excursions or activities on Thursday 31st January only. This will affect some PE classes on Thursday – those classes will still run but they will be at school and not off-campus. Previously arranged excursions for Friday onwards will go ahead as planned but parents and carers will receive hard copy permission & medical forms for these excursions until our IT system is fully operational again. We apologise for the inconvenience of the hard copy format but we believe it is preferable to cancelling the excursions and having the students miss out.

I will email you again tomorrow afternoon to provide you with an update and a report on how Day 1 has gone for your children!

Regards to you all,

Bernard Neal
Principal