Principal's Welcome

As many of you may know, our CEO Edward Tudor is taking parental leave in Term 4 to spend more time with his daughters Betty and Mabel, and to enable his wife Rhi to get back to her job as a primary school teacher. So, for our newsletters this term there will a principal's welcome instead of a CEO's welcome!

Term 4 is always such an exciting time in the MITS community. Highlights in the term ahead include our annual Gala Dinner on Thursday 19 October, our Year 7 & 8 Canberra Camp from 13 - 17 November, and our Student Celebration Dinner at the MCG with students and families on Wednesday 6 December.

Since early this year MITS has been considering how we can make a meaningful contribution – most importantly a contribution that elevates the voices and perspectives of our students – to the Voice Referendum campaign.

Ultimately, we agreed to focus on three priorities: to provide education around the Voice proposal, to engage in quiet conversations with our students, families and staff, and to support our students and staff during what has been a robust national discussion.

Over the last few months, we have come to understand that although some of our community have different views, and we respect the right of every member of the MITS family to hold those views informed as they are by their own lived experience, there is very strong support across the majority of our students, families and staff for the Voice proposal. This support sits naturally with our MITS DNA: we know from our own daily experiences that listening to the voices of our students, our families and our First Nations staff has made MITS a better place and it has made our MITS community here in Melbourne richer and stronger.

Empowered by the clear support of students, family and staff, we decided at the end of Term 3 that we needed to start to take positive action to elevate the voices of our people: to speak directly to our local Melbourne communities, delivering an uplifting and most importantly impactful message, and so we committed to the following actions:

(billboard) In the first-floor window of the upstairs lounge room at 371 Church Street, we installed a huge “YES” billboard, with a transparent film delivering a simple and powerful message to everyone who passes us on Church Street.
(staff t-shirts) We bought a YES t-shirt for every staff member and student who wanted one.
(Yes badges) We placed baskets of YES badges in the 371-reception area for visitors to take.
(email signatures) We encouraged and supported any staff who wished to, to add a Yes23 email signature to their MITS email.

We also remain committed to education and to protecting our students and First Nations staff against hurt. To that end, we have made resources available to all of our students and staff to help look after themselves through the debate and the vote, and our wellbeing team has been, and remains, on standby to support students or staff who experience hurt or upset during the coming weeks. We will also have a whole of MITS dinner on Sunday October 15, the day after the vote. We hope that this event will be a celebration, but if not, we will take the opportunity to care for each other as a community.

Brad Carmody

Principal