Mr Simmons’ Tidings this week shares with our whole College community his address to our parents at the Meet the Teachers event:
Welcome to RCC. Thank you for coming tonight and investing in this partnership, between staff and parents, it is one of the most critical partnerships in the success of your child’s schooling.
Tonight we are excited to provide time for you to hear from our Heads of School and your student’s teachers who are passionate about building relationships with you so that we can equip your kids to be wonderful contributors!
Before I hand over though, I wanted to share a little bit more with you about our core purpose, our deep hope at RCC for your children and you, their family. You know we are passionately committed to creating students who know they have been intentionally created to do great things, that they have a God given purpose and a hope that comes from knowing this.
I trust you also understand that we believe that, on these strong foundations of identity, purpose and hope, it is in partnership with you that we educate our students, your children, in such a way that they become contributors who know how they are going to leave their fingerprint, on their local and global world.
The challenges before us to continue to achieve this in 2024 are two-fold; coming from internal goals and external pressures as we continue to grow.
We are so excited as we look back on last year and see us continue to grow in excellence in many areas (RCC’s Got Talent was bigger than ever, we had students represent at all levels of sport, we had the greatest number of students receive Band 6s in their HSC courses and our NAPLAN results showed continued improvement in writing, and our graduates continued to find their places in their desired courses or traineeships). Which is all great and just the tip of the iceberg. However, at RCC, success is not only defined in these traditional ways. At RCC success is defined a little differently and measured more by our capacity to empower our students to love what they are doing and in doing so fulfill the good works they were made to achieve.
At RCC success is also (and it is important to say also) evident in less traditionally measurable ways; a student’s ability to grow, to make mistakes, to learn, to see where they went wrong and improve. It is in a student trying something new, it is in a growing confidence to believe in themselves and speak up, it is understanding their identity and being empowered to walk that path. It is knowing and relishing in their passions and strengths.
We know we are growing well as a school when our students are taking risks in leadership, trying out for sports that are new to them, speaking to new people, risking an audition, speaking on stage because they love it and want to intentionally improve. And, we are excited that this is what we saw for many of our students last year.
We are looking forward to setting the example in these areas for our students to follow this year. We are excited to continue to strengthen the current unique academic, cultural and sporting opportunities that seek to extend each student, we are committed to continuing to ensure each child is safe, belongs, known, valued, supported and challenged in their learning. However, we are equally excited to respond to the feedback from last year and work on creating more opportunities for creative and performing arts, create more opportunities for teacher-student connection and feedback and NAPLAN showed us we need to continue to work on improving our student’s spelling ability, so we are actively pursuing the best way to do this. We are also hoping to complete Stage 1 of a master plan that sees the completion of a second basketball court that will be undercover, a library and 2 more classrooms. It is important for us to model to our students that we never stop reflecting, learning, or growing too.
To grow well we must also be aware of the external influences that seek to shape and mould us. We are a distinctively faith-based school, our Christ-centred, biblically based, culturally relevant and academically rigorous approach to education is intended to equip students with solid foundations of truth and wisdom that encourage an enduring sense of identity, purpose and hope.
However, if you follow the media on independent and particularly faith-based schooling you will see that there is a push to remove certain freedoms that allow us to be us and maintain the safe and supportive, gracious and empowering culture we have.
In particular there are two current reforms in NSW that seek to remove our ability to counsel students regarding identity and purpose of any kind, let-alone concepts of loving and intentional design. There is also a strong push to remove the freedom of faith-based schools to include faith as an essential criteria for employment.
A school that is culturally relevant, though, one like ours, is one that understands the desires of its community and is able to respond in a way that values difference and is stronger because of it, whilst at the same time standing firm on the foundations and beliefs that have got us to be who we are without compromising them. We are passionate about being faithfully present in our world.
As a staff, we are excited to learn how to continue to grow as a school; supporting and valuing each member of our community in times of change whilst not compromising who we are and what we do for our community’s sake. This is how we will continue to navigate these external challenges: understanding, reflecting, growing for the good of our students.
To finish, I would like to share a quick parable with you:
In his book, Redefining Success According to Jesus: Is your definition of success harming you?, Dr Omar shares this parable of three stonecutters:
A long time ago, man came across three stone cutters and ask them what they were doing. The first replied, I’m making a living. The second kept on hammering while he said, I’m feeding my family. The third looked up with a visionary gleam in his eye and said, I am building a cathedral for the glory of God.
As such, it is our hope that tonight we can strengthen the connection we have with you, impart some of our story, experiences, knowledge and processes so that we can strengthen your toolkit to be able to assist your students at school and at home so that together we can help our kids see that what they are doing each day is building their own cathedral in celebration of who God is and what God has made…
Blessings
Jonno
