Principal's Report
Evan MILLER
Principal
Carina Garland 2025 Community Spirit and Leadership Awards
On Friday 21 November, I attended the 2025 Community Spirit and Leadership Awards, presented by Dr Carina Garland, Federal Member for Chisholm. Each year she presents these awards to a student from each school within the Chisholm community.
The Community Spirit and Leadership Awards recognise inspirational young people who make a difference to their communities and an important contribution to the civic life of their schools. Principals are invited to nominate one student from their school who is someone who leads by example and encourages others to contribute not only to their school community but to the wider community.
This year I nominated Alexia Bastas in Year 10. Alexia was nominated for her kindness and compassion shown to others in our school and the wider community. She is always eager to help and support those around her. Alexia has enrolled in a Certificate III in Allied Health as one of her VCE subjects next year, with ambitions to become a nurse, reflecting her compassionate nature. She has received many positive values chronicles from teachers and is one of our Sports captains who has volunteered on student free days to support local primary schools on their sports days as one of our leaders.
Alexia’s parents and grandmother attended the night and were very proud she was recognised for this award.
School Council 2025
I would like to extend a huge thank you to all our school councillors this year for their input, feedback and support of the school. Our school would not run as well as it does without a strong and vibrant school council. In reflecting on the year, we have achieved the following:
Updating our school uniform
Updating and/or developing a range of new policies
Responsibly managing the financial position of the school and setting a vision for continual improvements of our buildings and grounds including new revenue streams through hiring of our facilities
Update and renewal of areas of the college including, garden bed seating, extra railing at the bus stop to ensure student safety, bleachers on the basketball courts, the upgrade of tennis courts 1 and 2 to a multipurpose synthetic surface.
New seating on the Basketball Courts
I would like to acknowledge Geoff Mace, Jason Galle, Felicia Giles and our VCE VM students who put together the bleacher seating which is now on the Basketball Courts for our students. The idea for the bleachers came from our student body and the money we raised from the colour run (with a little help from School Council) made the purchase possible. Geoff Mace, our facilities manager double checked all the fittings to ensure safety, and it is great to see students now using them in PE classes and at recess and lunch time.
Junior / Intermediate Music Concert
On Wednesday 5 November, we held our Junior / Intermediate music concert in the theatre. It was great to see the progress our junior and intermediate music students have made since the beginning of the year. A big thank you to our Instrumental Music Coordinator, Ben Plant, Chris Mitchell, Aysha McCoy and our Instrumental Music Teachers who supported our students on the night and continued to make our music program the amazing program that it is.
VEX Robotics
I am very proud to inform our community we have teams who have qualified for the VEX Robotics National Championships in Adelaide, the US Open in Iowa and we have a strong chance of at least one team qualifying for the VEX World Championships held in Houston, Texas next year. I would like to acknowledge Bryleigh-Ann Legg and Joe Wang, our Robotics coordinators who give up many of their lunchtimes to coach, mentor and develop our students, allowing them to represent Highvale and achieve the excellent results they have this year.