From the Principal

Dear Families,

Today has been a very exciting day. Today we officially opened our New Building. It was fantastic to gather together with the people who first dreamed up the vision of the New Building, people who assisted in gaining funding for the project, those who designed and built the facility and those who were contracted on the many different aspects of the projects. We celebrated the amazing achievement of the Building Committee and all invovled in the project. 

Below is a copy of the speech I delivered at the Building Opening today.

Good Morning Everyone,

How exciting it is to be here in our new facility? I’m as excited as you are. It’s been a journey that has taken us 7 years to be where we are today and we’re proud that this facility is ours at Galilee to be utilized and celebrated amongst us and the local communities of South Melbourne and Port Melbourne. 

We have had a few challenges along the way but there has been some key people who have brought this dream into a reality.  It began when I was started at Galilee in 2016 after 2 weeks and a parent Bernie Mandile, who is here today, made a comment to me “Why don’t you build a rooftop playground?” Of course I could see that our students needed more space and the idea began small but certainly grew much bigger. 

We then went through the process of meeting key members of the school community and I came in contact with Donna McMaster who was Chair of the School Board and together with Deb Butcher we formed a building committee and we started off on what we thought was an impossible journey. Cameron Sinclair set out a plan and the journey began.

Fortunately, we chose a great architect firm and a great architect in Wayne Stephens from Clarke Hopkins Clarke who has been with us on the entire journey;  together we dreamt  big with the encouragement of MACS staff.  A number of consultation sessions were held with students, staff & parents. Together we came up with the concept of not only building more space as a rooftop area but contemporary classrooms, a STEM room the Mal orr creative Space, a stadium, a Performing Arts room … many of the things that encapsulate the passions of Galilee. 

We were certainly driven to produce superior and modern facilities for not only our students, parents and staff but we genuinely wanted to connect with, help and support our local community.

It began with an idea and a drawing, we had challenges attempting to gain support for finance. We received bipartisan funding support prior to the 2018 election (our local member from the State Labor Party, Martin Foley, Margaret Fitzherbert and Andrew Bond from the State Liberal Party). Following the election, the State Labor Party honored their pledge and thank you to Nina Taylor who is the member for Albert Park and Parliamentary Secretary for Training and Skills and JoshBurns our Federal Member.

From there we worked on a design with Wayne & his team and one we are very much proud of after much consultation with our students, staff & parents.  Again we hit obstacles with some environmental factors and with much hard work and persistence and the help of local council members (Marcus Pearl & Andrew) who are here today, we were able to overcome that difficulty and progress into construction.

COVID-19 hit and caused some delays but again we persisted and our community was extraordinarily flexible and enduring in the way they coped with the restrictive playground and building space for almost 2 years. 

I’d like to thank the many people who have been part of the journey, particularly the parents and children who finished their education here prior to the completion of this project at Galilee, we are very grateful to you. 

While I thank all students, staff and parents for their contribution, there are certainly some groups of people I’d like to acknowledge and I might ask them to stand up briefly and we will give them a clap as we go.

Key school staff: Pauline Semmens - Planning, Wendy Dalton - Finance, Carmen Carnovale - Design and Co-ordinator of todays event & Paul Mapley - Construction and Facilites Manager.

Representatives of the State Government 

Clarke Hopkins Clarke architects with their design and project management, Wayne, Karin and Gabby.

CICG members for their construction,  Nic and Rob

MACS Staff for their support and advice over the years and Simon, Loren and Madeleine .

Margaret Fitzherbert and Andrew Bond who organised oppostion support for the funding of the project.

Local council members who have visited our school numerous times and have been very invested in our project.  Thank you. 

Contractors who have assisted in a multitude of ways from the sound, the lighting, through to the solar panels.

To our Building Committee members who we are going to acknowledge a little bit later on but then again thank you for your thoughtfulness, brilliant ideas and persistence over the years.

We are very proud to have this facility for use for our school and local community and I hope you enjoy the rest of the opening ceremony today.

Thank you everyone.