From the Principal

Dear Parents and Caregivers,

Welcome back to Semester 2! We trust that you enjoyed with your families some quality time together. Whether you were vacationing, under the doona reading a book or even if you were having to work (as we know most of our parents do), we hope that the pace of the winter break was at least a gentle change to routine for you all. Apart from a couple of working days, my semester break was filled connecting with family and nature! A road trip with my dear mother, revisiting places from her childhood along the New England Highway, sitting in front of open fires in country pubs coupled with some fabulous nature trails. It was certainly not an exotic holiday, but restorative and ‘cup filling’ nonetheless. Perfect in its Franciscan simplicity. I hope that all in our community found their happy place this semester vacation.

Late last term and during the holidays you will have seen via our social media channels some of the tremendous accomplishments of our Mt A students, not least of all Airlie Davis (Year 12)  who competed at the 2024 Australian Swimming Trials – Airlie, we are SO proud of you! Our Open A Netballers who competed valiantly at the recent QISSN competition in Townsville, Elisabeth Rooney and Heidi Dowling (Year 10) who headed to the UN Youth Australia’s National Conference to participate in the UN championships, our FCIP students who have participated so brilliantly at the recent camps. Our sincerest thanks are also extended to the wonderful Mt A Staff who gave up their precious holidays to support our FCIP students and our netballers. We are so grateful.

This week we have looked forward with anticipation to our SET Planning and Mentoring Meetings with students and parents. As a college, we are committed to ensuring that pathway planning, subject selection, educational wellbeing, and meaningful feedback informed by learning analytics will be helpful to parents and students alike. We are so immensely proud of the conscientious way our students are approaching their learning this year and look forward to engaging with parents in ways that ensure that this 3-way partnership remains a priority. I want to thank our resolute Teaching Staff for their diligent preparation in the lead up to these valuable conversations and we do hope that the conversations have been productive, informative, and purposeful. In our subject information evenings late last term, we reiterated our ongoing commitment towards ‘empowering partnerships’ with our parent and carer community. Recent statistics from our student parent subject interviews last semester, highlighted a 4% engagement rate for our Year 12 families, and several other Year levels below 20% which we would obviously like to see increase. We thank all those families who provided further feedback on the structure and timing of these interviews so that we can, in turn, assist families further in their participation.

On a similar theme, it is worthwhile reiterating the importance of full school attendance more broadly for our students. Of course, at the height of cold and flu season, we would always insist that students remain at home if they are genuinely unwell. However, a few days of indiscriminate absence each term can quickly amount to hours and hours of missed learning and social connection which impacts on the educational wellbeing of our young people. It is a slippery slope!

We thank our parents and carers who continue to work in partnership with the College in helping their young people build the resilience and tardiness required for school and post school life. 

In the coming weeks and following on from their hugely successful and galvanising Year 11 Reflection days, our students will soon hear from prospective candidates for our 2025 Year 12 Captains. We wish all our aspirant leaders the absolute best as they embark upon this process and look forward to announcing our Portfolio and College Captains during Term 3. 

Our sincere thanks to all our MtA families who have generously offered to host our Japanese sisters from Nigawa Gakuin, we are so grateful for your hospitality and support of these students in the coming weeks. It was fabulous to see so many of you at the information night held at Padua College this week.

In the coming weeks we also look forward to the spectacular performance work of our students in “Alice @ Wonderland”, to our Literacy Society event in the iCentre “Read with your Dad”, our Mt A & Padua Parent Series T3 event with Andrew Fuller and our much anticipated inaugural Parent Social “Christmas in July”. We hope you can join us! 

Thank you to the generous support of our Parent Partnership Panel

In some extremely exciting news, our college now has the great blessing of three newly installed water refill stations for our students. The College would like to acknowledge and thank the efforts and sponsorship of our Parent Partnership Panel (and all our parents!) for their generous contribution to this essential facility for our students. Thank you also to our Maintenance Team for overseeing the installation over the break. The students are very chuffed, we all think they look fabulous!

Principal’s Book Recommendation

As a departing gesture, I was gifted by outgoing Deputy Principal, Kathy Dendy - Julia Baird’s most recent book “Bright Shining: How Grace changes Everything”.

So much has resonated, too many excerpts to mention here! However, I would like to share just one small excerpt with you. 

“…. most fundamentally, grace is something undeserved. In its crudest interpretation, karma is getting what you deserve. Grace is the opposite: forgiving the unforgivable, favouring the undeserving, loving the unlovable. With grace you get something you have done nothing to earn. It is mercy, not merit. And grace, in giving people another chance, the benefit of the doubt, an opportunity to learn and change, can unravel people, redirect futures, melt hearts, heal family rifts, transform lives. We can see some of this in restorative justice. ……it is the ability to see good in the other, to recognise humanity, to tolerate difference and to continually plough lives, conversations and public debates with a belief that people can change, and that what we fight for is joy and beauty, as well as equality” p.9.

In a world where blame and entitlement underpin a common language, presidents trash talk and vitriol and outrage are a currency of clicks and algorithms, we can be better; we can do better. Let us be the community with a critical mass of kindness and grace.

Let us also pray for those in our community who continue to face serious illness, loss of loved ones and personal challenge. May our love and compassion continue to be visible to them all this term.

Peace and all good,

Samantha Jensen

Principal