Principal's Report
Term 1 is soon coming to a close and it is hard to believe that we are almost one quarter of the way through the year. There has been a lot happening across the term and the past few weeks are no exception to this. I am writing this report having just come back from visiting the Year 9 Maths classes who were running their Probability Fair activity. It was clear that the students were having a lot of fun with the activities and were learning a lot about both probability and the perils of gambling (for example, that the House always wins). Yesterday, I returned from an overnight stay with our Year 8 students at their Outdoor adventure camp in Lake Eildon. I had the pleasure of joining one of the groups for a canoeing activity in the morning after a BBQ dinner at camp the night before and heard tales of hikes and rafting activities and wildlife spotting (at least one Platypus and maybe a couple of snakes). The Year 8 students were clearly having a great time on camp and will come back with many tales to tell (and they will also probably sleep very soundly for at least a couple of nights!). We were certainly very lucky with the weather this year with only small periods of rain which were not enough to generate the mud pits that we encountered last year.
Earlier in the week, I held our first meeting of the School Improvement Team which includes our school student leaders and myself. In these meetings, we work together to identify areas of the school’s Annual Implementation Plan (AIP) that the students would like to support, and they get to make suggestions as to what the school can do to ensure improvement are realised. In this meeting, our leaders identified several areas where they felt there was potential for them to provide support and committed to various activities to enact this. They also gave me a lot of great ideas that I can also put into place to further bring about school improvement.
Earlier in the term, we put out the call for student to nominate for school council as part of the requirements for schools to have two student members on council. These students provide representation for the student body on decisions made by school council. They act as the student voice in school-based decisions and have the same voting rights as the parent and staff representatives. This year, we had five students nominate for council from across three different year groups from Year 8 through to Year 11. This meant that a ballot was called, and students voted in Mentor Group last week for their preferred council representatives. The results of the ballot were then collated, and I am proud to announce that our new student representatives on school council will be Harry Wall of Year 10 and Darcy Cook of Year11. I would also like to say a big thank you to Claire Puckering who has been our student representative for the past two years and has done an amazing job.
In the coming week, there will be some key events occurring that are worth keeping an eye out for. Firstly, our Open Night will be held on Tuesday the 4th of April. On this day, classes will finish at lunchtime to allow for the set up of the school for this important event on our calendar. Students will be dismissed at lunch time; however, any students wanting to stay back and help with set up are encouraged to do so. Students staying back to support Open Night by either speaking at the information session, guiding tour groups or by working in subject areas will be provided with a pizza dinner and communication about this will be coming our soon.
As you will see from the articles to come in this month’s newsletter there has been a whole lot more happening at the college over the past four weeks.
Kerryn Sandford
College Principal