Principal's Update

Dear families,

It is great to be back learning onsite again and seeing all the students having more normality in their lives.

I want to thank our families for all their support during the most recent lockdown. Remote learning is much more effective when parents and carers are checking the progress of their children and informing the school when things are not going well.

In general, we have noticed that motivating the students becomes more difficult the more lockdowns we go into so let’s hope we avoid them for the remainder of the year.

The current restrictions as well as the current situation throughout Australia with COVID have forced the school to make some decisions on upcoming events.

Our college production of We Will Rock You has been moved to the final week of the term. Unfortunately, this means that it will clash with our Year 10 Top End Tour, however, we were only provided with two possible weeks to move it to due to the availability of external staff required to operate the sound and lighting.

The first date clashed with the Year 11 Snow Trip. Both date changes were going to result in a small number of students having to choose between two events. The reason we have chosen the later date is because there is more chance of having an audience the later in the term we go and if a Year 10 student misses the production due to a clash with the Top End Tour, at least they will have the opportunity to take part in our next production in 2023. We do apologise for this situation and our thoughts go out to those students who will have to choose between Top End and Production, however, we were given very little room to move.

As a school we have decided to cancel this year’s Year 9 Melbourne Experience. With current restrictions preventing any visitors in households, organising accommodation is currently impossible. In addition, many of the venues we visit as part of the experience are reluctant or unable to have groups of visitors.

We also feel that in the current COVID environment we don’t want to be sending our students to Melbourne and have them visit multiple venues and catch lots of public transport. We will be working to offer our Year 9 students activities in Term 4 to make up for missing this trip. I hope you all understand our decision-making process in relation to this trip.

We are still waiting for restrictions in schools to ease prior to scheduling a new date for the Senior Ball and as soon as we are in a position to make a decision, we will inform our Year 11 and 12 students and their families. Current restrictions prevent us from gathering large groups in one space, prevent dancing, insist on facemasks, and prevent any non-essential visitors coming onsite. A senior ball would certainly not be very enjoyable under these conditions.

At this stage our Year 11 Ski Trip and our Year 10 Top End Tour will still be going ahead and planning and preparations for these two trips are well underway. 

The General Assessment Task (GAT) has been rescheduled for the second time. The new date for the GAT is Thursday August 12. This day will be a student free day for all students not required to undertake this assessment.

Thanks for your understanding and flexibility with our ever-changing calendar this year.