DEPUTY PRINCIPAL'S REPORT

Demonstrating Reverence for our School Community Resources

This week we launched a Pilot Project of Community Service. Each class is rostered on for a Community Service shift during Lesson 4 once in Term 1. This means that the class and the teacher will undertake between 10 and 20 minutes of Community Service. Initially this will most likely be cleaning up our yard however it has the potential to move into other ways of engaging in stewardship of our resources. The idea that we have a responsibility to care for the things around us has deep roots in the Catholic tradition. ​​Our Church teaches that we are stewards, we are caretakers for the things of God and we are called to use these goods wisely and justly.

At a purely civic level, contributing to the maintenance and care of our resources just makes sense. Our College Community Expectations set out that We respect ourselves, others and our learning environment. The fact that there is rubbish in our yard consistently means that we are not upholding this expectation. It is not to say that we can’t or we won’t but at the moment all our students need to be particularly attentive to the way they use our yard and our classrooms. We would like to see students using the many bins around our school instead of leaving the discarded wrappers behind when they leave a space. Classrooms too are places where students need to be responsible for the resources they are using and leave rooms clean and tidy. 

The idea of Community Service at school isn’t centered on ‘doing someone else’s job’ or on making the “good” kids pick up rubbish or equipment that others leave behind. It is an effort to encourage a collective responsibility for the stewardship of our schools. Being involved in volunteering in a secondary school, albeit it engineered to a degree, has the potential to develop in our students a sense of community, a sense of commitment to the other and a sense of pride in our school. Our young students are the volunteers of the future and participating in Community Service at this grass roots level in our school may have lasting benefits for our wider community.