Health & wellbeing news

IDAHOBIT

IDAHOBIT is International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Intersexism and Transphobia. IDAHOBIT is held on 17 May, as it marks the day that the World Health Organisation removed homosexuality from the Classification of Diseases. This occurred as recently as 1990.

This year we celebrated this important day of action and our school restated its commitment to ensuring that all members of our school community deserve to feel safe and supported. 

Some immediate actions our school took to support LGBTIQA+ inclusion were:

• Encouraging all staff to include IDAHOBIT banners in their email signatures, and these are attached to this email. 
• Providing staff training run by Safe Schools – this is being coordinated by the wellbeing team and will occur early in Term 3.
• Convening a working group to review and make recommendations on how gender identity is considered in documents and systems such as enrolment forms, WB referral forms, Compass etc. 

Thank you to the Richmond Queer club (supported by Mill and Kiki) for suggestions for staff and student activities on the day. These included:

• All staff and students being encouraged to dress in a ‘block colour’ from the rainbow, and to donate a gold coin to Minus 18, an organisation that leads change, builds social inclusion, and advocates for an Australia where all young people are safe, empowered, and surrounded by people that support them. 
• Staff and students baking and decorating rainbow cupcakes
• Staff and student badge making at lunch time
• Queer artists playlist to exhibit students' favourite songs

Celebrating our Education Support staff

LHCS is lucky to have a highly skills and dedicated team of Education Support staff working across both the Richmond and Coburg sites. On Tuesday, 16th May we celebrated ES Appreciation Day. To acknowledge all the amazing work that is regularly done by our ES Team to support their colleagues and the school's students, we held a morning tea at each campus. Additionally, staff and students wrote notes of appreciation to let each of our ES staff members know how much their work means to us all.