Student Services News : Wellbeing 

Welcome back! 

Welcome back to Term Two! We hope you have all had a fabulous break and had the opportunity to have some fun, hang out with friends, and spend some quality time on your own, with family and  with pets. 

The Student Services Wellbeing Team continues to offer support to students and families. There are a couple of ways to get in touch if you would like to someone to talk to or are seeking some resources or advice.

1. All students are always able to pop up to M11 and ask to chat with someone from the team.
2. Years 7, 8 and 12 students and their families can email their Student Wellbeing Coordinator Megan Simmons directly at megan.simmons@nhs.vic.edu.au
3. Years 9, 10 and 11 students and families can email their Student Wellbeing Coordinator, Sabatinie Balasooriya, directly at sabatinie.balasooriya@nhs.vic.edu.au 
4. Families can call the Student Services Wellbeing Team directly on 94882321
5. Student and families can also email Leanne Petroff your Head of Student Services at leanne.petroff@nhs.vic.edu.au 

In other news, we will soon be welcoming our new Secondary School Nurse, Tess Hodgins-Parry, who will be with us two days per week and will be focussing on health promotion. Stay tuned for more information in the coming weeks! 

Last Friday, we said goodbye to our Mental Health Practitioner, Kat Brissett. Kat has commenced family leave and we hope to see her return next year. Kat has worked in the Student Services Team since Term Four 2018. In that time, she has been a Year 7, 8, 9 and 10 SWC, our Program for Students with Disabilities Coordinator, championed and managed our amazing Raise Mentoring Program, supported many, many, many students, families and staff, facilitated students and staff training opportunities, ran wellbeing programs and written many of the newsletter reports we know you read and love! 

We would like to thank Kat for her hard work, empathy, dedication to the wellbeing of our school community and for being such an important and knowledgeable member of the Student Services Team. We wish her the best of luck with pending birth of her baby.

Year 12 Sexual Consent Presentations

Last term, the Year 12 cohort had Nadine and Sarah from the Northern Centre Against Sexual Assault (NCASA) visit us to educate us about consent, sexual assault, and healthy relationships. These topics are important in today’s society and something our cohort continues to be passionate about. Two separate sessions were run for girls and boys, with a third run at Rainbow Club for LGBTIQA+ students. NCASA work closely with schools and their sessions cover topics including sexual consent, your rights, pornography and how to access more information and services. The overall feedback was that these sessions were beneficial for Year 12 students and covered important topics in an interactive and engaging way. Many students found the presentation to be eye-opening and expressed that they had learnt new information. NCASA will hopefully be presenting to us again in the future and we look forward to having them come back and educate us further.

Sophie Hargreaves and Miette Rolfe – Year 12

At the end of last term, we had representatives from NCASA come in to discuss sexual consent to the Year 12 cohort. Due to the messaging which young people receive about sexual consent in a patriarchal society being binary, the year level was split up into different sessions to ensure each group received relevant information that was tailored to them. I attended the boys’ session run by Kaye and Angie from NCASA in the PAC which I found to be very well received by everyone attending; we were an attentive and respectful audience throughout. At the start of the presentation there was an occasional question or two, but that quickly changed, with the PAC erupting into a series of intriguing questions for Kaye and Angie to help clarify our understanding. Overall, I was impressed with both the informative content delivered to us by NCASA as well as how respectful our cohort in the boy’s session was, considering the sensitive nature of some of the topics discussed. 

Noah Rindschwentner - Year 12

Therapy Dogs 

In M11 (the Student Services office) you can find 2 weighted, toy therapy dogs, Clover and Pebbles, as well as Kevin the hedgehog. Clover is a cute border collie, Pebbles is a golden retriever and Kevin the hedgehog is a plush toy with flippy sequins on his back. You can also find Apollo in the Senior School office, inside the Performing Arts Centre. Apollo is also a golden retriever who looks quite alike to Pebbles and has a sparkly collar which tells you their name. Then you can find a husky named Sky in Ms Archibald’s office, who has lovely soft, thick fur and ears great for stroking.   

When you are feeling down or just a little nervous about the school day, you can pop over to M11 and sit in a quiet room with Clover, Pebbles, or Kevin. You can tell the animals your worries, stroke their fur, and focus on feeling it run through your fingers or speak to one of the lovely staff in M11 while a dog sits on your lap. In English and Humanities, Ms Petroff (whose office is M11) has kindly been letting us do our work with the comfort of Pebbles Or Clover sitting on our laps, if they are not busy; it makes the lesson more fun and stress free.

 Jemima  and Rose  - Year 7