David's Message

Dear Sunshine Heights Parents and Carers,

For today's newsletter, rather than sharing an update on student learning, I would like to share a little about the learning of adults in our school. During 2024 and 2025, Sunshine Heights is part of the Refugee Education Support Program, or RESP. This is a partnership between the Centre for Multicultural Youth, Foundation House and the Edmund Rice Foundation. These organisations have been supporting us to gain deeper knowledge of the supports, strategies and knowledge to enable migrants who have experienced trauma to thrive in our community. 

I have the honour of being principal to a beautiful and highly multicultural school community; we know that diversity is our strength, even when some in the world might cast it as a source of fear. Diversity is not what divides us, but creates an opportunity to know ourselves better as humans. Later this term, on the 21st March, we celebrate Harmony Day, and we will gather for our Block Party to showcase our strength. This is also the International Day against Racism, and it is important we highlight the need for proactive conversations with our children about the steps we have to take to combat both overt and covert racism in our community. 

I wanted to share a poem from Brian Bilston, a British Poet, that I have found to be one of the most challenging and thought provoking pieces of literature I have read over the years on the subject of racism towards refugees. Please read all the way to the bottom, and then back again...

Refugees

They have no need of our help

So do not tell me

These haggard faces could belong to you or me

Should life have dealt a different hand

We need to see them for who they really are

Chancers and scroungers

Layabouts and loungers

With bombs up their sleeves

Cut-throats and thieves

They are not

Welcome here

We should make them

Go back to where they came from

They cannot

Share our food

Share our homes

Share our countries

Instead let us

Build a wall to keep them out

It is not okay to say

These are people just like us

A place should only belong to those who are born there

Do not be so stupid to think that

The world can be looked at another way

(now read from bottom to top)

David and the Sunshine Heights Team