Clare's Message...

My message this week is all about COMMUNITY and these past few weeks have seen so many wonderful opportunities for our St Luke's COMMUNITY to shine...

What we can achieve when we come together cannot be measured. 

Last week, Rosa Phillips launched the Year 5 'Connecting to the Community' program for 2026 and took some Year 5 children on the first-for-the-year visit to Starfish ELC. The excitement for our students and the fun had with a younger learner at Starfish was palpable. We are very grateful for Rosa's commitment to ensuring this works perfectly- and it does!

On Friday, all of children ran in the school cross country, organised by our new PE Specialist, Michelle Boyce. We are very appreciative of the help from the many parents who helped marshall throughout the day and for the wonderful planning put in by Michelle. Our thanks to the Pisciotta, Pourgoutzidis, Coates-Stilve, Nguyen, Hampton, Vithiyandandan, McCaul, Marino, Koutsaplis, Connane and Soesanto families along with our Senior School leaders. Our children loved having you and the many spectators there to cheer them on.

On Saturday, we held a very productive and successful working bee- our first for the year. The jobs were many but we managed to spread metres and metres of mulch, to plant out a particularly unremarkable patch outside rooms 6 and 7- which now looks remarkable, to revamp the garden beds- ready for planting, to clean out drains, to prune the carpark garden bed, to paint two external library doors and, to repair a couple of other doors. What an effort! Of particular joy was listening to the children chatter, laugh, squeal with delight and engage as they helped or played. I am very grateful for the support from P&F funds to purchase the materials needed. A very big thank you to the following families who pushed through a very hot and humid day to achieve an enormous amount of work: Coates-Stilve, Mitri, Smith, Harkin, Keeghan, Tierney, Pisciotta, Coe, Mann, Thong, Fusca and Connane. We are loving the our spaces even more.

On Sunday, we launched our Open Week to the local community with school tours on offer. We welcomed six families in to visit our spaces and to get a snapshot of all we have to offer. They loved it and we're hoping we will see them in the years to come as their child begins their primary school years. We had four of our Student Leadership team- Hannah, Mason, Stella and Jonathan ready to accompany us but unfortunately, everyone turned up to the first session even though some had booked other sessions. How generous of our Year 6 kids to offer up a part of their Sunday to help out.

In a few weeks time, we have the Commitment Masses for any child celebrating a sacrament this year. If your child is in Year 3, 4 or 6, we warmly invite your family to join us at any one of the masses on the weekends of 14th and 15th March or 21st and 22nd March.  It is a requirement of the program that each candidate attends one commitment mass. Other extended members are very welcome to join us, as well. Please look for the details in the Faith and Mission page of this newsletter.

My apologies for the delay in this newsletter getting to you; sometimes the week just gets away. I hope yours is going well.

Have a great day.

Clare