Patrick Burke, Prefect & Heavey House Captain
The new school leaders have started their interview process and will soon be selected for their positions. This made me reflect on the past 12 months and the progress we have made as a Leadership Team throughout this challenging year.
The year started as normal, and we organised a basketball competition and had our school swimming carnival. They both were a great success, and brought many boys closer to their House, which is a tremendous accomplishment for the school. Several smaller initiatives happened in this time including barbeques for charities such as Lifeline.
However, in late March just before the school holidays, students were sent home and had to start remote learning. The Student Leadership Team’s focus was to remain in contact with the students and ensure they had someone to turn to. This resulted in the Team recording their struggles and advice for keeping things normal at home. From many reports this helped a large number of students both in motivation and finding purpose in a troubling time.
I would like to thank the staff for putting up with the frustrations of online learning. The dedication and strive for success are a testament to their work ethic and the need to help their students. Their ability to push through their own lack of motivation, while also motivating and assisting others all day, hasn’t been unnoticed and was greatly appreciated by all.
Thankfully, we returned to school and things slowly started to come back to normal, and the Student Leadership Team were faced with organising activities in a new social distancing world. This resulted in a spelling bee and other smaller activities that still provided House spirit and competition amongst the students.
I speak on behalf of the 2020 Student Leaders and the Year 12 cohort when I say I will be forever grateful for the experiences, knowledge, growth, and development we have made over this year and the ones before it. St Augustine’s has given us so much and I will take that into the later years of my life
Good luck to the future school leaders and Year 12 students, I hope you can achieve all you set out to do.
