Welcome

A very warm welcome to you for the 2021 school year and our first newsletter for the year. It has been fantastic to welcome our students, both new and returning. We hope that every family had an enjoyable time throughout the holiday break and that you feel ready for a productive year. We extend a warm State High welcome to the new families who have joined us and we look forward to working with all of you over the coming year.

We are celebrating 100 years of outstanding education in our school. We have launched the celebrations with an event last Friday and a little media coverage to set the stage for a series of exciting activities through the year. We are hoping that current parents/guardians and students, as well as alumni, will all have a chance to be involved in one or more of these Centenary events this year. You will find more detail on the Centenary website.

Every student is important to us. We have more students than last year, with an increasing number of local students. We have around 550 Year 7 students joining us this year and around 3,450 students in total.

These first few weeks are about supporting our students to make a positive start to their learning. They need information, to establish some routines and to get started. We’re all here to help that process along. Some handy information links to get you started:

Lesson times

Lesson times for our students can be found on our website and in the Parent Information Handbook.

Parent Information Handbook

Our Parent Information Handbook is available on our website. It contains information about the organisation of Brisbane State High School. Please take the time to read through the handbook and keep it for your reference. In the handbook, you will find information about the day-to-day operations of the school, together with contact information for key personnel.

Sport this week

Another handy resource is the ‘Sport this Week’ link on our website under ‘Extra-Curricular’ > ‘Sports’. This is a good one to bookmark. It is updated around the middle of each week.

Extra-curricular registration

The registration process of all extra-curricular activities, including registration forms for Girls Sport, Boys Sport, Cultural Activities and Other Activities, can be found on our website:

School newsletter

For families who are new to our school, if you would like to receive our newsletters directly to your email inbox, please self-subscribe to our school newsletter via our website:

Current and archived newsletters are available on this web page:

Apps and resources

Information about apps and resources for 2021 was sent to parents and guardians via email on 10 December 2020. For assistance, please contact Winc directly via:

• Phone – 1800 004 427
• Email – csinboxbacktoschool@winc.com.au
• Winc Customer Service ­– customerservice@winc.com.au

Information regarding the apps and resource lists can be found on our website:

iPad program

Information about iPads is available at:

School communications

School communication to parents and guardians is generally sent via email or SMS. It is therefore important to keep the school informed of any changes to your contact details. You can advise of changes to your contact details by emailing student_records@brisbaneshs.eq.edu.au.

Please be aware that in some instances, our emails are delivered into ‘junk’ or ‘spam’ inboxes. Please check those inboxes in case emails from the school have been delivered into those inboxes rather than your primary inbox. Unfortunately, this is out of our control and your settings may need to be adjusted to ensure emails sent from our school are delivered to your primary inbox. Depending on your email provider, there are a few solutions. These include adding the school’s ‘sender’ email address from any official school emails that wind up in your ‘junk’ or ‘spam’ inbox to your contacts or ‘VIP’ list, or marking the email as ‘not junk’.

2021 School Priorities

Our Strategic Plan describes our three priority areas. These priorities continue in 2021:

These priorities are underpinned by a focus on ‘visible learning’ where teachers are learning through the eyes of a student and students are seeing learning through the eyes of their teacher.

Class of 2020

I am very pleased for our graduating students of 2020. There were some very excited students as they received results and offers for this year. They worked their way through a new system and a COVID year to achieve, possibly, record breaking results. We had 100% of students complete the requirements for a QCE/QCA, again. We are committed to ensuring that every student achieves this qualification.

In terms of ATAR results, we had really strong results. It should be said that our students produced very high-quality work, made good progress and they worked very hard. The teaching staff were delighted to hear about the way 10 of our students [10 we just picked as a sample] progressed over Year 11 and 12 and how this led to a preferred option for this year.  We had one student achieve an ATAR of 99.95 with a further 21 students achieving 99.75 or better, making 22 of the top 150 students in Queensland. Based on the best available conversion, we had 72 students with an ATAR equivalent to an OP1. That would eclipse the best result in this state ever. We had 63 students achieve a 99 or better and 269 students an ATAR of 90 or better.  Nearly half (49%) of all results were As. Eighty percent of subject results were 65 or better and 26% were 90 or above. Thirty subject results were 100% and 28 were 99%. The median result was 92.65.

Our students had a very good year. I’d like to congratulate them on their hard work over an extended period of time, while acknowledging that they had excellent support from classroom teachers and their mentors.

You can read more about their results on our school website: 

Staff

Leadership & Management Team 2021

We welcome Ms Amanda Chamberlain, Mr Graeme Harding, Mr Jamie Hunt and Mrs Michelle Rivadeneyra to the Leadership & Management Team. We also congratulate Ms Abby Green, Miss Amy Hawke, Mrs Rebecca Johnson, Miss Lucy Jordan, Miss Carly Simpson and Miss Emily Packer who are in new leadership roles this year.

We also have a number of teaching staff members, as well as a new teacher aide, joining us this year and we welcome the following new staff:

Contact details for all staff can be found on our website:

Academic competitions

There are a number of academic competitions on offer throughout the year, a selection of which are as follows:

Correct at time of publishing. Please refer to the Events Calendar on the website for current information.

Further information about academic competitions is available via the relevant Head of Department. Contact details are available on our website.

Key dates – Semester 1

Key dates for 2021 can be found on our school events calendar on our website.

Referencing our calendar regularly is an effective way to support the work of students and teachers. I encourage you to keep checking our website for key dates.

It is also important to check that your child has synced the Assessment & Learning Calendar from StudentNet to the native calendar on their iPad!

School Council

At our final School Council Meeting for 2020, held on Tuesday 3 November, we farewelled Ms Chris Collins (Staff Member), Mr Rob Farago (Parent Member) and Priscilla Soo (Student Member). We thanked them all for their service and contribution to the School Council. Ms Collins was part of the School Council since its inception in 2013, Mr Farago served on the Council since 2014 and Priscilla was our Student Member for 2019 and 2020 and has now graduated.

We congratulate Ms Kimberly Rase who was re-appointed as a Staff Member on our School Council.

Two Parent Members for our School Council were elected at the October P&C Association General Meeting. We welcome Ms Nancy Cole and congratulate Ms Marie-Claire Grady on her reappointment.

We welcome Samuel Zhu (Year 11) who this year joins Holly Skordou (Year 12) in the role of Student Member.

Brisbane State High School Councillors 2021

Front Row (L-R): Miss Kimberly Rase, Dr Judy Smeed, Mrs Marie-Claire Grady, Holly Skordou

Back Row: Ms Nancy Cole, Mrs Michelle Koripas, Mr David Gillespie, Samuel Zhu, Ms Nikki Bazaine, Mr Wade Haynes

Vale

Ms Kim McKernan

We were very sad to hear that Ms Kim McKernan, our School Based Youth Health Nurse since 2013, passed away on 15 December 2020. During her time at State High, Ms McKernan supported many of our students. Our sincere condolences are sent particularly to Kim’s two sons – Jack and Tom – as well as family and friends.

The Honourable Michael Bryce AM AE KStJ

We were further saddened to hear that the Honourable Michael Bryce AM AE KStJ – former student (Class of 1955) and Legend of State High – passed away on 16 January 2021 after suffering from a prolonged illness. Mr Bryce was an Australian architect and graphic and industrial designer. His most famous logo creation was the 2000 Sydney Olympic squiggle of the Opera House. Last year, we were honoured to have Mr Bryce provide invaluable guidance, support and encouragement to our student centenary logo team with whom he worked in the design of the centenary logo for our school’s centenary celebrations this year. Our thoughts are with Mr Bryce’s wife, former Australian Governor-General, Dame Quentin Bryce, as well as his family and friends.

We extend our best wishes to our students and families for a great start to the year.