From the Principal

From the Principal - Sonja Mercer

Welcome to our School Newsletter for Week 1, Term 4.

Can you believe it snowed? What a spectacular way to end term three!

On Thursday of week three you are invited to attend our PHS Open Night. The evening will begin at 5:30pm with some brief presentations from staff and students, followed by a free sausage sizzle cooked by the Peterborough Rotary Club and will end with small group guided tours of our spaces and facilities. This is an excellent opportunity to get to know your local high school and to have informal conversations with members of staff and other families. I particularly encourage families of future PHS students to come along and see what we have to offer and how your child can benefit from the years of experience and expertise we have developed as a secondary education community. 

Your child will be bringing a note home, if they have been asked to help present or facilitate an activity on Open Night. This is an optional undertaking but I encourage you to support your child in attending Open Night as a presenter, facilitator or participant, as it a wonderful opportunity for your child to be a part of their PHS community.

Being heard and listened to is a valuable part of a young person's journey of development. As they grow and experience the feeling of being part of any community, sharing their voice is part of this growth towards adulthood. At the moment our student leadership group are redeveloping the PHS School Values, to create a set of values that better represents them and their world. They have surveyed their peers and the wider community and have collected a large set of options. The next part of this plan is to narrow the options to create a cohesive and suitable set. Please look out for further opportunities to help our learners contribute to the changes and development of our school. I commend the student leaders, and contributors, to the work they have put into this venture so far.

While we are creating a redeveloped set of school values, our learner dispositions remain unchanged. These are a set of qualities of mind that the students, staff and PHS community developed a number of years ago. Learners are able to practice the application and understanding of these dispositions in every unit of work they do. Please have a look at the Learner Disposition posters later on in this newsletter. Ask your child about how they work on these in their classes and why they matter.

Thank you for providing your feedback on the new newsletter format through our survey. The results were overwhelmingly in favour of retaining the online newsletter, with a couple of requests for a paper based version to be available to community members of families who may not have internet access. This will be the last week that paper newsletters are sent out to all families. If you would like to continue receiving a paper newsletter, please return the tear off slip attached, or call or email Sarah Mercer at PHS. We will still keep some paper copies in the front office and library for you to collect as you pop in.

Regards,

Sonja