Principal's

Message

Hi and welcome to the first edition of the Triune in my time with Trinity College Colac.

The challenge of connecting with past students and keeping them informed and involved, where they are able to, is one we aim to tackle in coming editions to share stories and build upon our broad sense of community.

Whether you are fresh out of school in 2019 or one of the original students of Trinity College, St Joseph's College or the amalgamated school, we have a lot to share with you. And I am sure our current staff and students have a lot to learn in return and will continue to take great pride in the successes and adventures of our Old Collegians.

The College is ever-changing both in processes and physically, but perhaps the most obvious differences for you will be in the physical buildings and facilities.

Towards the end of Tim O'Farrell's time as Principal the school opened our Jubilee Centre - the home of performing arts - and our synthetic oval and running track.

Earlier this year I had the privilege of witnessing the new St Joseph's Resource Centre officially open for use. We have included an article and photos from the day, but in essence it is a high standard, modern home for the former Paatsch Library, plus our IT, Careers and Media units, and study areas.

We now have plans to upgrade current wings to cope with the waves of large student groups coming through. It is becoming more common now to have six home rooms at Year 7 level and we need additional rooms to cater for that with an expected enrolment next year of around 780 students.

Beyond that we are planning to replace the older wings of the school, creating a new home for senior year levels, and to extend or rebuild our hall. At the same time, you would notice continual upgrades to our landscaping thanks to a dedicated maintenance team.

The COVID-19 outbreak has certainly impacted this current school year, and at the time of writing all year levels are at home for 6 weeks and learning online.

We are still working through the possibilities for several of our major functions and events, and will postpone where we can, but it won't be possible to pick up everything we missed in recent months due to a busy back end to the year.

I was extremely proud of the way our students, staff and families prepared for, delivered and participated in remote learning earlier in the year, and again in this current period.

We were very fortunate to have the IT infrastructure and platforms in place to allow us to move to remote teaching very quickly. There is no doubt we are all better skilled because of this challenge.

The local area has been hit hard by the Covid-19 disease and we had one student test positive a few weeks ago which resulted in a  school closure, deep clean and testing for several students and staff. Fortunately, we did not report any further positive cases and our student is well on the way to recovery.

We hope all of our past students reading this are safe and well wherever you are right now.

In relation to educating our students, we are always evolving and last year the introduction of Project Based Learning within the Year 9 curriculum was designed to address the challenges of retaining focus and developing learners that can collaborate, research and solve real world problems.

Another change introduced at the start of 2019 was a new timetable structure for the school day. Each day now consists of five, one hour lessons and our students have a long break early in the day, shortly after 11 am, and a short break at around 2.00pm. The change in timetable structure has enabled an increase in the learning and teaching time for each subject in the senior end of the College and enabled our staff to meet with their students more often over the ten day cycle. 

Our College motto remains 'Virtus Nobilitat', or as Brother Tuck translated, Virtue through Nobility or doing good deeds makes you a better person.

Our College Vision was reviewed last year and simply states: Inspired by Jesus, We Make a Difference. We strive to do this every day.

I hope you find this edition of the Triune informative and entertaining. Please contact us with story ideas or contacts for Old Collegians who are out there "making a difference". And please talk to us if you are planning to arrange a reunion with your former schoolmates. We would love to open up the school, when restrictions are eased, and provide any assistance we can.

Kind Regards

Paul