Welcome to our Term 1, Week 9 Info Share
This week, our Senior Leaders began their mentoring program with our Junior Leaders. Each year 7, 8 and 9 leader has been assigned a mentor from year 10, 11 or 12 to help guide them through the leadership process. With over 120 students involved in our leadership program, these students have the opportunity to shape the direction of our school and contribute to some fantastic projects along the way. This program extended out to the primary schools this week, when school captains and leaders from around Hervey Bay joined with our Global Leadership Academy students to work on establishing their legacies back at their individual primary schools. While discussing their ideas, they were treated to a delicious breakfast supplied by our Certificate III in Hospitality students.
One of the things that I am most proud of in our school, is the range of curriculum offerings that we have, allowing our students to explore and be successful in many different pathways. This all culminates in the senior school, where there are 34 internal options for our students as well as the multitude of TAFE and other external opportunities such as School Based Traineeships, Apprenticeships and work experience. All students in years 10-12 have the opportunity to participate in work experience, which we have available to students all year round, rather than a set block like some schools do. This allows for a broader range of opportunities for our students and far greater flexibility for employers. If your student is interested in taking up this opportunity, I encourage you to touch base with our Pathways Officer, Aki Flux so that we can assist in this process.
As Mrs Weatherley mentioned last week, the Senior Swimming Carnival for Years 10-12 will be held on Friday April 1. Students had the opportunity to put forward ideas for the theme for this year's carnival with "Heroes and Villains" coming out on top. It will be great to see the variety of ideas that this theme will bring. The carnival will have a large number of fun activities to cater for those students who are not competitive swimmers or confident in the water while at the same time allowing opportunities to contribute to house points.
Our Positive Behaviour for Learning (PBL) focus for this week has been 'treating others with dignity, consideration and respect'. This focus has been a great follow on from last week’s National Day of Action Against Bullying and has allowed students the chance to consider how their actions or the actions of others can have an impact on themselves and their peers. Our year 12 Certificate III in Retail students took this one step further with their Friendship stall to give students the opportunity to spread a little bit of positive energy and joy amongst their friends.
At the end of each term, we hit assessment season. This can be met with varying levels of success depending on how students engage with their set tasks and assignments. Over the last week in particular, there has been a steady stream of meetings taking place with parents of year 11 and 12 students who have not engaged as well as they could have, and have therefore triggered Academic Good Standing (AGS). One of the common mantras I use with our senior students is that year 11 and 12 is for those students who want to be here, need to be here and deserve to be here. Being a part of the senior school is a conscious choice as there are alternate options available for students once they turn 16 or complete year 10. Our job is to guarantee that every student has the best opportunity to achieve their Queensland Certificate of Education (QCE) and the only way that this can be done is through successful completion of subjects and/or courses that students enrol in. There is a wealth of information about the QCE and senior schooling on the Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority (QCAA) website. For our year 10 students, this will be something that you will begin to become far more familiar with as the year progresses towards your SET Plan interviews in August.
One of the best parts of being a student, is the opportunity to go on excursions and get outside the school gates for some hands-on learning. We have a large number of off-site activities scheduled throughout the year across a broad range of subjects and extra-curricular areas. Each of these will hopefully give the students some lifelong memories that they will be able to share in the future. With COVID-19 continuing to present a few challenges, we are having to rethink how some of these activities are planned and what extra measures we need to put in place. Obviously if a student were to test positive to COVID-19, or be identified as a close contact while on an excursion or camp, this creates an additional layer of complexity in regards to accommodation, isolation and transport.
With over 1400 students now enrolled at our school, our facilities are becoming more important than ever. Few schools can boast the range of world class facilities we have at our school and the opportunities that these create for all of our students. Over the next 9 months there are plenty of projects that will be happening in the school, ranging from full construction projects like building the ground floor classrooms in the new science block, through to further refurbishment, air-conditioning and painting projects. We will do our best to minimise the disruption to regular classroom activities, but accept that this will be unavoidable in some instances.
To finish off, we would like to thank our entire school community and the wider Hervey Bay community for their generous support during our World’s Greatest Shave fundraiser organised by our year 10 leaders. This week our tally went above the $10000 mark as you would have seen in our Facebook post. This is an amazing effort and great recognition for the importance of this event on our school calendar. Congratulations to all involved.
Have a wonderful week and enjoy the upcoming school break with your students.
Rob Burke
Head of School - Senior