Principal's Update

Congratulations to our Year 12 students on completing and graduating after 13 years of schooling. This is an exciting milestone in everyone’s life. I wish the Year 12 VCE students all the very best with their exams and I look forward to celebrating with all Year 12s at the Valedictory Dinner.

A reminder that if you don’t already, please follow our Facebook page. You can see usually daily updates of the sorts of things students are doing and the kind of opportunities they get to be part of at Mirboo North Secondary College.

We have noticed a decline and decrease in attendance at some camps/excursions.

 and we are not sure if this is due to financial challenges for families post the storm. If your child is not attending a camp or excursion, we are asking that families decline the event in Compass so we can continue with our planning. A reminder also that families can arrange a payment plan through the office (5667 9000). We are more than happy for payment plans to be set up. The difficulty for us is that if we don’t have an accurate sense of numbers for camps/excursions – we end up losing money as we anticipate that everyone will attend. It’s a bit like if a family books a holiday and at the last minute someone decides they are not going – generally you have already paid for things!

Similar to my feedback after the Cross Country – schools design a program around the expectation that ALL students will be attending. Post Covid, it seems like parents’ support students to opt in or opt out of the school program; often at the last minute some parents will collect students from school because the student has decided that they don’t want to do whatever is happening next. I don’t believe this is a great thing to encourage in young people – in life, we often do things we don’t want to do, and participating often brings surprising rewards. Avoiding things that make us anxious, will usually lead to further avoidance – again this tends to increase issues moving forward – not decrease them.

The students are excited this week to be celebrating Halloween, and we are very much looking forward to going to the Aged Care home in town and bringing the residents a little bit of Halloween – is it cheer or fear! Thank you again to the VOS students and Ms Benn for organising this event.

The long weekend – School will be closed both Monday and Wednesday. Some staff will be working at home Monday on Mandated Department of Education modules, and we have a whole school Professional Development Day on Wednesday. The school will be open on Monday and staffed for VCE exams.

Get ready everyone for the busy period coming up to the end of year! Our School Presentation Evening is on the 17th of December so please save this date 😊

Vaya Dauphin

College Principal