S.R.C. Annual Report

FROM OUR SCHOOL CAPTAINS

Our year in S.R.C. has been one of our most productive years yet… despite the many interruptions, like home learning and wet day timetables, which meant that our Friday meetings were postponed. 

We are excited to share our achievements with you - to celebrate the successes of our many amazing S.R.C. representatives from Years 1-6s in our school.

Let’s start from the beginning of 2021… In our first ever S.R.C meeting on 19 February, 2021, we created a draft of the new S.R.C Essential Agreement that we would have for the rest of the year. 

At our following meeting, a student raised the issue of leaking drink taps. This was a topic that we discussed for the next two meetings and ultimately, we decided that we needed to raise money to purchase and install new drink taps, which are more environmentally friendly, don’t leak and have timers installed in them. 

The other idea that was raised in our meeting was that we needed more acknowledgement at our school of the traditional Indigenous owners of the land on which we learn… so, we set our minds to creating a large scale Indigenous painting - near the bike racks and the hall. 

We decided upon designing beanies in order to raise these funds, and we dubbed the beanie the ‘Murrumbeenie’. The ‘Murrumbeenies’ were popular but unfortunately, did not raise enough money to cover the costs of the mural and the new drink taps. We will elaborate on our next course of action in a moment...

Around that time, we also reviewed the traffic light system to see how effective it was, and how we should nominate the new Aussie of the Month. After reviewing and discussions, the students reported back that the current traffic light system was fine and worked well.

In May, we started talking about a Movie Night for extra money to go towards the bubblers and the Indigenous mural. Over the following weeks, we brainstormed movies, shortlisted them and researched the licensing requirements of us showing the movie in the school. Unfortunately, given the lockdowns, our Movie Night was postponed for a long time.

We decided at the beginning of June that we needed new value animals which reflect our school community and values. 

We decided on value frogs as our value animals and decided on ways we’d select their names. We decided on the two names of our valued frogs, Kero and Tiddalik. These names were chosen based on community input from teachers, students and families. We had a lot of families who wanted the name to have links to Indigenous cultural stories, and also to reflect Japanese culture. Therefore, we chose Kero - the Japanese word for “ribbit!” - and Tiddalik - from the Indigenous Dreamtime story.

After that, we once again changed the date for Movie Night… spoiler alert..... it still didn’t happen. 

On Friday 13 August, we held our first online S.R.C. We created a photo competition and discussed how we should judge the competition. Over the following two meetings, we discussed the photography competition, shortlisted and judged the winning photos. During this time, we also asked children for their feedback regarding home learning, and passed important feedback on to the teachers.

In September, we judged the portrait competition and we discussed the new S.R.C profiles for school Instagram and class Dojo. We wanted to introduce the community to our school leaders, but not only the senior ones, as we wanted to ensure our community knew that the junior leaders contribute actively to S.R.C. and have special, unique and amazing ideas. Mrs. Brennan’s Year 5 class began writing and posting the profiles on ClassDojo.

As we headed to the end of the year, we decided what we wanted to do for the 2022 school carnival - including the rides and theme that we wanted - and we extended our Murrumbeena Masterchef competition.  In our latest meeting on 3 December, we talked about the S.R.C end of year break up. We also made an incredibly important decision about the charity we wanted to donate to, for the end of term free dress day (for Term 4). We voted on the charity being chosen, however, a majority of the S.R.C.s voted to contribute to the Neuro Endocrine Cancer Australia Foundation in honour of Mrs. Foster, our principal, who passed away this year due to endocrine cancer.

We’ve had an extremely productive year full of lots of new experiences and it was an honour to run all these meetings. 

Thank you to all of the members and teachers, Mrs. Brennan (Miss Callanan), Miss Nasreddin, Miss Bongers and Miss French for all of their hard work and help throughout the year.

Thank you to the school community, including our parents, for supporting our endeavours, fundraisers and ideas.

Written by School Captains, Audrey and Calvin

(And many thanks to our school captains for their much appreciated reports!)