It was so encouraging to see the many smiling faces and to hear conversation and laughter filling our classrooms and playgrounds again this week.
Our students, including our Primary students loaded with extra bags ready for swimming and our Year 11/12 students back for their final few weeks prior to exams, seemed genuinely pleased to be back.
We have had plenty of building and development work over the holidays with our new Secondary classrooms craned into place. It was exciting to see half-a-dozen past students working on the School as plumbers, builders, and electricians but it was still an eerily quiet place. At the end of each break, it is a reminder that schools are about people and relationships.
I particularly enjoy re-connecting with our returning students, it feels like a reunion of sorts. As teachers greet students and ask after them, what we are really expressing is that we value you and our relationship with you. After several terms or even years of relating with our students, we genuinely feel their absence when they are not here. For a number of our students, as much as they enjoy holidays, I know that the relationships experienced at school are critical to their sense of connection and wellbeing.
“At the start of this week, our School felt like a flourishing place. ”
At the start of this week, our School felt like a flourishing place. As a parent, I also want my children to flourish and I wonder how I best support their flourishing. Sometimes I feel like I am doing this well, at other times not so well, and sometimes they seem to be flourishing in spite of me!
A passage of Scripture reminded me that sometimes flourishing can begin in the midst of difficult circumstances and sometimes just requires simple acts of faithful consistency from us. Jeremiah wrote an encouragement from God to the people of Israel living in captivity in Babylon – ‘Build houses and settle down; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Marry and have sons and daughters… Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper’ (Jeremiah 29:5-7).
I look forward to a term filled with those simple acts of faithful consistency as we as teachers and parents work together to lay a foundation for our children to flourish. I know that you will join me in praying for the flourishing of students, families, and our School.
Scott Ambrose - Principal