School Leaders

On Monday 10 February, we held our Student Leaders’ Induction Ceremony. We recognised, congratulated and encouraged our four School Captains, 26 Prefects, 16 House Leaders, four Spirit Leaders, six Junior School Captains, two Student Representative Council Leaders and 28 members of our Junior School Leadership Team. To be selected for these positions, these students are clearly remarkable young men and women. Now they step up to the role of making a difference for everyone in our school. We look forward to their leadership this year.

2020 Student Leaders’ Induction Ceremony

Our special guest speakers were Lillian Rangiah (Prefect) and Raphael Wixted (School Vice-Captain) from the Class of 2016. I’ve selected some of the great messages from their speeches for you:

"Part of leading by example means using any opportunities and privileges we have, to help make the world a better place for all of us. And one privilege that we all have here at State High is that we get go to school with people from all walks of life. We have the opportunity to meet such a diverse range of people here and to try to get to understand the unique values, opportunities and challenges facing people who are not like ourselves. I strongly urge you to take advantage of this privilege, and to use it to make State High and the world a better, more equitable place for everyone.

Part of being a leader also means having the courage to dive into the unknown, to forge new opportunities for yourself and others – and to keep working at them. When I was in high school, I was often encouraged to pursue a pretty traditional path by going into law or medicine. But instead, I chose to work really hard in the fields I’m passionate about: cultural studies, philosophy and economics. I guess what I’m trying to say here is… it takes courage to carve out a different path, but that path could benefit so many others. Sometimes leadership is having to do what you believe is right, not just what others think is right.

We need more people who will take the time to sit down and listen to someone else. They may be a friend, a sibling, a younger student you happen to know, or just a peer who you sit next to. When we take the time to hear what they have to say, we are showing leadership by telling them we value their experience; by communicating to others that this is how we do it; and by reminding ourselves that being a leader is about what we can do for those in our community, not the other way around.

I think then, perhaps the most valuable thing to remember about leadership is that you personally are capable of it. It’s a cliché that anyone can be a leader, but what I think is often overlooked is that this kind of leadership – the quiet, slow, personal things we do with and for those around us – is really the most important form of leadership available."

Lillian Rangiah and Raphael Wixsted speaking at our 2020 Student Leaders’ Induction Ceremony

Lillian Rangiah 2016 Prefect
Raphael Wixted 2016 School Vice-Captain

What amazing insights! Combined with some outstanding speeches from our new leaders, this made for a powerful start for this year’s leader group. I wish that everyone could have been there to be inspired by this.

We have an outstanding group of leaders for 2020. We wish them well over the next 12 months and congratulate them on their tenure.

Enrolments

We have settled our enrolment numbers at 3,361 students, which is made up of the following:

• Year 7:     561
• Year 8:     534
• Year 9:     589
• Year 10:   588
• Year 11:   569
• Year 12:   520

This finalises our staffing allocation and we have made adjustments to match this final number. We extend a welcome our new families.

Connecting for Our Students

Over the last few weeks, we have welcomed many of our families to our Parent Information Evenings for each of our year levels.

It was great to meet so many parents and guardians at these information evenings; the opportunity, albeit brief, to make connection between families and teaching staff is invaluable. We appreciated the opportunity to explain how things work in this school so that you and your students can gain maximum benefit from what is on offer. The PowerPoint presentations from Year 7 to Year 12 information evenings are available on our website.

Thanks for the important part you play in making all of this work.

As we move into Week 5, you might like to expand your conversations about what your children are learning. Across the parent nights, we talked about some prompts for these conversations that, with persistence, might elicit more meaningful responses. You might like to try:

• What were three good things about your day?
• What were you learning (WALT = We are learning to…) in each class today?
• How did you go by the end of the lesson? How did you think about the WILF (What I’m looking for) the teacher gave you?
• What feedback did you receive today?
• What are you reading at the moment?

Year 12 Program

Our Year 12s have their first Internal Assessments this coming week, in our mini-blocks. These assessments are the first that count towards their final result, remembering that each subject has a maximum of four assessments in the year. You might think these are rather early in the year. They are early since they cover work from last year as well as the deepening of this learning over that last few weeks. It is a chance for students to show their mastery of these first pieces and to bank some high quality results. It also has the effect of spreading the load more than we have ever seen. Our 12s will be looking to use the time between assessments to build real expertise.

QCE Academic Achievement Awards

At the Queensland Certificate of Education (QCE) Achievement Awards Ceremony on Saturday 15 February, four State High graduates from the Class of 2019 were among the state’s top Year 12 achievers (of 31 students in Queensland).  Congratulations to our four awardees who were recognised as Distinguished Academic Achievers at the Ceremony, at which Sunny Fan, Madeleine Orr and Calder Barksdale attended.

QCE Academic Achievement Award winners

L-R: Calder Barksdale, Madeleine Orr and Sunny Fan pictured with Mr Wade Haynes