Principal’s Report - 19th March 2021

What a great couple of weeks I’ve had since I last wrote to you all in our last newsletter,and what a fantastic couple of weeks we have coming up as well, to finish the term off! What’s made recent weeks so good is the amount of engagement I’ve been able to have with so many of our amazing students, especially our student leaders. I sometimes allow myself to get stuck in my office and sometimes that’s unavoidable but recently I’ve been pushing aside some of the tedious admin and getting out and about around our school.

Student Leader Reception

Last evening, I spent a few hours at the beautiful Bunjil Place with our four senior student leaders at the City of Casey Student Leader reception. This has become an annual event and one that I look forward to each year. Our leaders, Tom, Methuki, Hannah, and Krish are incredible young people and I relish opportunities like this to get to know them better and listen to their aspirations and ideas for our school. They were motivated by many young speakers and performers at the reception. We were all particularly inspired by Lucy Lockit, a young entrepreneur who, along with her sister, began a company called Project Rockit, to initiate a more proactive, positive and contemporary approach to programs to diminish bullying, prejudice and hate in schools and society. Lucy’s key focus is around kindness and I am sure she inspired every student leader there with her presentation. We, in fact, had Project Rockit out to our school a couple of years ago to work with our senior students on this important subject. I know our student leaders have come away with some great ideas on how we might improve the way we deal with these issue in our school, and in our community more broadly and I look forward to further conversations with them.

National Day of Action Against Bullying and Violence

The Student Leader Reception was very timely given that today is National Day of Action Against Bullying and Violence. Our whole school will be involved in range of activities across the day, encouraging teachers and students to open up conversations about bullying, its causes, its impact and ways in which we can continue to eliminate bullying from our school and from the lives of our students. The data we have and the conversations that we have in classrooms and in student forums all indicate that bullying is at a very low level in our school. Our discussions with students also indicate that they have a range of strategies to deal with it, if and when it occurs. But we can always do better. We need to constantly listen to our students, give them voice in our school and respect and acknowledge their experiences and their solutions. Today is a great day to encourage and highlight those conversations but this is on-going work and we can’t just leave it to one day.

Our student leader team grows – congratulations!

The following deserving students were announced as leaders in various capacities at last week’s assembly. Congratulations to all of them!

House Captains 2021

Water	Fire	Earth	Air
Akhilesh Potluri	Namish Thevarasa	Sujeeth Sai Gade	Lucas Prioste
Vanessa Munshi	Anusha Khatiwada	Manreet Sidhu	Isabelle Grimmer

Specialist Leaders

Music	PE	Spanish	ICT/Digitech
Ashleigh Thomson	Ada Savasir	Anandita Mehmi	Michael Demetriou
Sirat Minhas	Tarkyn Harris	Dhrithi Vinay	Yonal Samarasinghe Gunawardena
Sustainability	Art	Wellbeing	Science
Georgia Argaet	Evangeline Salama	Aarna Gije	Rijul Shirke
Kiandra Brizmohun	Arpit Kaur	Tanya Sharma	Anirudh Ysore

A visit from my boss

Last week, I had a visit from my current manager. Vicki is the Senior Education Improvement Leader for our network of schools and, being new to the role, she has been visiting schools in the network, probably one of the more enjoyable parts of her role. Whilst we had a very enjoyable tour and a great conversation about what we do and how we do it at Lyndhurst, I was most pleased by Vicki’s final summary comment. She described our school as “really child-centric”. She said that, thinking as a child, she would love walking into our classrooms and playing in our playgrounds. It’s possibly the best compliment I’ve heard about our school, especially as this concept of “child-centric” has guided all of our decision making since the school opened. We have built this school in all ways to serve the needs of our children as learners and, as an experienced educator, Vicki was able to see that and feel it.

Harmony Day

I’m so excited about our Harmony Day next Tuesday but I am so disappointed we are unable to have parents at our morning parade. Our plans were dashed earlier this week when new guidelines were sent to us from the Department. It meant that we would be simply unable to manage the COVID safe requirements. We are still exploring ways of livestreaming or recording the parade for everyone to enjoy. More details to follow.

St Patrick’s Day

Wednesday of this week was, of course, St Patrick’s Day, a day on which those of us of Irish heritage celebrate our Irishness. Our unmistakeably Irish Assistant Principal, Moira McCann, ensured that we all had a very happy St Patrick’s Day. Moira has encouraged me to more attentively engage with my Irish heritage. I have, in fact, visited Ireland and I was able to research and discover some of my family heritage which was exciting for me. Of course, I am 4th or 5th generation Australian by birth but the heritage of our ancestors is such an important part of who we are, no matter how long we’ve been here. Harmony day next week is a day on which we can celebrate our commonality as Australians, underpinned by the enormous diversity of our individual and collective cultural heritage.

Cranbourne West Secondary College Visit

Finally, last week, along with our Assistant Principals, I visited the new Cranbourne West Secondary College. It is a magnificent facility and we enjoyed our tour, especially because we were able to catch up with our 2020 year 6 graduates. They all seemed excited, and a little surprised, to see us and they all appeared really happy and engaged. Rob Duncan, the Principal, was so very welcoming to us and was full of glowing praise for the “Lyndhurst kids”. He is looking forward to many more students from our school joining Cranbourne West SC in the future. That was great to hear. We are so proud of our Lyndhurst students., even when they leave us!

Greg Lacey

Principal

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