From the Assistant Principal 

Junior School

Memorial Ceremony 

I would like to commend every Year 7-9 student in attendance at last week’s Memorial Ceremony for our late Principal, Maria Karvouni. The entire cohort behaved in a mature, respectful manner throughout the event, beautifully demonstrating our school value of Respect as we came together as a community. 

Having had the privilege of working closely with Maria for ten inspiring years, it was poignant, joyful and moving to look out at the sea of students proudly wearing their red blazers, current and past staff and parents and so many other special guests to reflect on how her leadership influenced us all in so many different ways. What an honour to have Maria’s closest family members join us in this celebration of her contribution to our school and to state education. They must be very proud to know the extent of her positive impact on the lives of so many. 

I do believe that Maria’s greatest legacy is the strength of this school community and I feel very grateful and fortunate to be a part of it. Thank you to all those who have expressed warm wishes of support and to Craig McPherson for his collaboration. 

Maria’s family have generously donated a special prize to acknowledge a student at each year level who has demonstrated our school values in an exemplary fashion this semester. Congratulations to Jay A of Year 7 and Saya U of Year 8 on being junior school recipients of this prize for their generous contribution to the Memorial Ceremony. Jay and Saya are Instrumental Music students and their beautiful clarinet performance marked the beginning of the event. These recipients remind us of the diverse range of skills and interests of our students beyond the classroom setting and the aspiration they demonstrate in practicing their skill diligently to achieve excellence. Neither Jay nor Saya had the opportunity to know Maria, but showed great respect to her memory by agreeing to perform. Our Year 9 recipient was Brigitte G of Year 9, for her ongoing commitment to student leadership at AHS. Brigitte has been an active member of the Student Leadership Team as well as an active and positive contributor to our school community throughout her enrolment at Auburn, consistently demonstrating our school DARE values. I’m sure Maria would have been delighted with the selection of these students. 

Instrumental Conservatoire 

Last week, a new relocatable classroom was delivered to the Canteen Courtyard area to house our Instrumental Music program. This will take pressure off our Lecture Theatre and other teaching and learning spaces, once again making these more widely available for other classes and extra-curricular clubs to use. We are only able to make improvements such as these thanks to the very generous support of parents/ guardians donating into our Building Fund. These donations are tax-deductible; please contact the office if you are in a position to contribute. More than 10% of students are currently enrolled in Instrumental Music lessons at AHS, and this number continues to grow due to the high-quality program provided by our fantastic IM team. If any of our families have any pre-loved instruments in good condition to donate to the IM program, these will be gratefully received. Please email 

Kristie.satilmis@education.vic.gov.au if you have an item to donate (especially if it’s a piano or electric piano!). If you would like to sign up for IM lessons, please contact the office. 

Junior school staffing changes 

You may have noticed some changes with the assignment of teachers to particular classes and some changes to class groupings over the past week or so. This has been due to a number of factors, including some reshuffling of classes to accommodate an influx of enrolments throughout Semester One as well as some unanticipated staffing changes, as well as moving to the semester two timetable. All this has resulted being able to run smaller class sizes in some instances, which is a fantastic outcome. We have been working as quickly as possible behind the scenes to recruit additional, appropriately qualified teachers and the school will send a further update once these are finalised. Feel free to contact the relevant Assistant Principal should you have any questions or concerns. Thank you to Ella Price and Georgina McKay for their diligent work in finalising our Semester Two timetable. 

Holiday break 

Congratulations to our Student Leaders on doing such a good job hosting our Semester One DARE assemblies this past week. It certainly has been a busy and eventful first semester! It was fantastic to see so many students receive DARE awards, but even more fantastic to hear them catching up with teachers afterwards to say thank you!  I wish all staff and students a restful, well-earned holiday break and look forward to welcoming students back on July 10th for another positive and engaging semester ahead.