Dear Families, Students and Community Members,

Welcome to Week 6! With the weather still on our side, it is hard to believe that we are over halfway through our first term of 2025.

Last week, I had the opportunity to meet our Year 7 families, it was an absolute privilege to welcome them to our fabulous Mordialloc College community. They were able to meet Year 7 teachers, Student Services, Careers, House Captains, Mordialloc College Student Council Captains, and IT. The event was designed and delivered by Brendan McFarland (Director of Junior School) and Jo Hannon (Year 7 YLC). A big thanks to all staff and students who came along to welcome our Year 7 families.

Swimming Sports Carnival

What a great day! Student behaviour was wonderful, watching students support each other and their house-mates was amazing, and the swimming was exceptional. All of our competitors had one thing in common: they threw their very best effort at joining in. It was a first for the Mordialloc College Staff Swimmers who put in a valiant effort against the students but didn't quite grab the gold medal.

I should not have expected anything less; it was so brilliantly Mordialloc! The recreation ground was left spotless, staff and students were exhausted but fulfilled, I was really proud of everyone who joined in on the day.

A huge thanks to the staff who made the day what it was, and of course a huge thank you to Cory Watters who brought it all together.

For those of you with a competitive streak, this year’s swimming champions were Iwala (red house). Congratulations to you!!

VTAC Headlines (Year 12 2024)

We hold tours for prospective families throughout the term (bookable via our Front Office on mordialloc.co@education.vic.gov.au) and, I am often asked to share our destination data; our VCE and VCE-VM students had a lot to celebrate including:

81 bachelor degree offers (66 single degrees, 15 students offered double degrees)
12 diploma offers through VTAC
12 direct entry diploma applications through TAFE

Our 2024 students have gone on to study a wide range of subjects that reflect the broad based curriculum, and personalised pathways that we have on offer. Those routes of study include Business, Arts/Hums, Architecture/ Engineering/ Surveying (the most popular route for 2024 Mordialloc College students) Science, Education, Psychology / Youth work, Environment & Wildlife Conservation, Animal Sciences, Creative Art & Design, Computing & IT, Criminology & Legal, Health, Exercise Sport/ Physiotherapy/ Nutrition, Tourism & Hospitality, and Music, Media, Film.

Level Crossing Rail Project

After a few bumpy starts around LXRP communicating which parts of the project will specifically impact our college, we have now arranged a date this week to meet with their project team to clarify pertinent information in a more timely manner. I do not want to flood your email boxes with information that is freely available on their website but, if we do receive updates that could severely impact our students’ travel to and from Mordialloc College, then I will continue to put this into the newsletter, and if pressing, send out via Compass.

Tim Richardson: MCSC Visit

Tim Richardson (Labor member for Mordialloc) has continued to support our students throughout Term 1, and it was great that he came in to speak with our Mordialloc College Student Council captains about what their plans for 2025 were, and how he could support them to be successful in that space.

We always appreciate Tim’s time, he continues to ensure that the Mordialloc community is well aware of how great our students are, and is genuinely interested in what needs to be done to deliver on fantastic outcomes for all of our students.

Staffing

We have some staffing updates to share with you:

Milos Lujic - English/Hums
Rachael McCracken - English/Hums
Aaron Davis - Substantive Assistant Principal (Middle School / Teaching & Learning)
Catherine Boulton - Human Resources Manager

We are often contacted by the Department of Education to contribute to teacher re-engagement initiatives, and it continues to be important to me to give those potential colleagues a great impression of Victorian public schools; I am always really proud to show off our college! Whilst there continues to be a teacher shortage across Australia, we will absolutely continue to do our bit to get amazing professionals in front of our students. We currently have two teachers who are part of the Teacher Engagement Program at Mordialloc College, and they will be working with us for all of Semester 1.

Drills

You may have heard from your child about a drill that was conducted at the college last week. All Department of Education schools are required by the Department to conduct emergency response exercises (also known as drills) at least once each term. The College has successfully been carrying out this exercise for several years.

The benefits of conducting a drill are:

• staff get to know and practice their emergency response responsibilities

• students become familiar with different response procedures

• the college learns from the drill by reviewing and improving response procedures.

Conducting drills for different types of emergency situations keeps our students and staff safe as it helps us to be better prepared in case we need to respond to a real emergency. We fully recognise the importance of rehearsing our response procedures to emergency incidents.

Following each drill, we hold a staff debrief to ensure we address any issues so that we can make continual improvements. This drill was conducted successfully so please pass on our thanks to your child.

I really do hope that you have a wonderful fortnight.

Rachael Stone

Principal

Wellbeing Supports Update