Principal's Message 

What a term it has been! From lock downs to torrid storms this term has had its positives but also its negatives.

Just remember that you are not alone.  The school will support all members of our school community.  If you need help please reach out.

"The greatness of a community is most accurately measured by the compassionate actions of its members." – Coretta Scott King

Remote Learning

As a school we evaluated our online practices and made significant improvements to it.  Thank you to the staff for being flexible and understanding the needs of the students.  

Well done to the students whose attendance was extremely high.

If we go into lock down again (fingers crossed we don’t!) we will implement this process or a variant of it.

Fairhills High School vision

I am pleased to unveil our new school vision.

The process we implemented provided the school community to have input.

• Staff created eights visions on our Professional Development day using the five most common words identified by them.
  • Inspire
  • Empower
  • Community
  • Inclusive
  • Supportive
     
• Three visions were created that used the staff ones for inspiration
• Staff voted and the least popular was discarded
• Students and parents/carers voted on the final two with 68% voting for our new vision
• Slight changes to make the more vision more impactful were made e.g. “To inspire” (future tense) to “inspiring (present continuous tense)

Thank for everyone who contributed to the development of the vision.

Where to next?

A vision needs to be much more than a tokenistic phrase.  As a community we need to live and breathe it.  Every action and decision moving forward will be checked against the vision.  Evidence-based decisions will be made to innovate not to placate. 

We also need to drill into the key words to make them relevant and actionable.  What are the behaviours and expectations needed to reach our vision? 

For example:

How do staff members inspire their students? 

What does it:

• Look like
• Feel like
• Sound like

How can  parents  support their child(ren) from an educational perspective?

What behaviours are required to enable inclusiveness for all our school community?

Like all important aspects of life, it will take time and commitment but am confident together we can achieve our vision.

Capital Works

Our capital works schedule is on schedule and all parties are collaborating effectively.  We are about to begin the schematic stage of the process. This stage involves researching and designing the buildings. Exciting stuff!

Currently we have funding for stage 1, which means our focus will primarily be on Science, Technology and the Performing Arts Centre.  After the school holidays staff members will begin to travel to other schools to see their modernised learning spaces.

The biggest question I get asked is, “when does the construction start?”  The current projection is April 2022 with an end date of April 2023.  This means that the Science building will be out of commission for most, if not all of 2022.  Rest assure we will create programs and structures that minimise the impact on our students’ learning. 

We are finalising our Master Plan, which is the design of the whole school.   If we receive additional funding from the government our community will have an amazing school we can all be further proud of.  We need at least 2-3 more stages of funding to turn our dream into reality.  I encourage you to contact Jackson Taylor Member for Bayswater (Labor party) or Nick Wakeling Member for Ferntree Gully (Liberal party).  Jackson and Nick have been great advocates for the school and understand the importance of a modernised secondary school in the local area. If they receive communication from members of our community it helps them argue our case more effectively.

Jackson Taylor

https://www.jacksontaylor.com.au/contact/

Nick Wakefield

https://www.nickwakeling.com.au/contact

Regards

Ian Van Schie

Principal