A message from the Principal

Ms Nerina Pretlove

Welcome to our last newsletter for 2020.

We are thrilled to announce that our top students: Dux - Vedika Surnam, 2nd - Erika Zotti, 3rd - Maddison Green and 4th - Jillian Connor have, along with their classmates, risen to both the challenges and opportunities that this year has presented. To our Year 12 students, we congratulate you upon your achievements. You have kept your focus and demonstrated maturity and tenacity to the very end.

There have been many who, throughout this year and its unusual times, have demonstrated leadership and commitment to our school community. Our Student Leadership Team has continued to impress and bring about change across the social and physical aspects of our school. They have identified, designed and implemented solutions that have addressed a range of issues. We are proud of their worldliness and their ability to give voice to those things of concern to them and our wider community.

One of the greatest challenges of this year has been keeping in touch with our families and the wider community. There has been a team in our school which has raised our profile, not just in our local community but across the state, the country and on the international stage through music, ceremonies and publicity videos. This would not have happened without the extraordinary vision, talent and skills of Head Teacher, Dr Thomas Fienberg, teachers Luke Chapman and Hepi Liku and our VET Entertainment Specialisation students who continued to impress throughout the year. Congratulations to Thomas on his nomination for the extremely prestigious 2020 ARIA Telstra Music Teacher Award. Well deserved.

To our staff, I am pretty sure the response from our teachers would have been comical, if I had told them, at the beginning of the year, that they would all be teaching from home! Our administration staff stepped up to support students and their families with the preparation and distribution of learning materials. I am very proud of how quickly and professionally they all rose to the occasion. We have risen to the challenges presented by the COVID-19 pandemic; flipping our classrooms to the online learning environment in a matter of a short six weeks and have all learned a lot in this process. As a result, in 2021, a team of teachers from the Intensive English Centre will be using their newly developed skills to begin delivering lessons across the world to international students who are unable to come to Australia due to the closed borders.

As challenging as the year has been to both the staff and students, it has also presented a test for our families. The concept of students learning from home has asked our parents and carers to participate in an alien world. This was the same for our students who also had to leave their known learning environments, structures of the day and, of course, their friends. It may have seemed disruptive and very foreign but you stepped up to it and we cannot thank you enough for your support of both your children and our staff. You are all heroes of 2020.

Kaizen, a Japanese term for continuous improvement or change for the better, sums up our focus here at Evans High School and Evans Intensive English Centre. We have continued to improve our learning environment with all classrooms fitted out with full class sets of Chromebooks. This has meant that access to online resources and learning has become a matter of fact rather than a special event and the GOOGLE classroom is a common platform.

The beautification of the school has continued and we are very excited that the long, long awaited renovations of our school hall will begin in the new year. We expect to be holding our 2021 Annual Presentation in a new state of the art, air-conditioned space. Call me an optimist!

During the summer break, work will continue across the school with more cutting-edge technology installed in classrooms, grounds improvement and the completion of our dedicated STEM room. Our gratitude must go to our team who will be working throughout the break with our contractors to ensure that we all come back to an improved learning environment.

The recent outbreak of the COVID-19 virus has reminded us that it has not gone away and that we do need to implement safe practices to look after everyone within our community. If we can keep it under control, we can minimise the impact of it on our students’ learning in 2021.

If you have missed some of the performances of our staff and students, including the Presentation Evening, please go to our Facebook page and share in our students’ and staff successes and enjoy some of the outstanding performances from across the year. From the staff and students at Evans High School and Evans Intensive English Centre, we wish you a safe and restful break. May 2021 bring great things to all.

Also, from the Evans High community, good bye and farewell to our departing staff and a warm welcome to our new staff members joining our team.

Thank you.

Nerina Pretlove

Principal

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