February 2024 Principal’s Report

Dear Fitzroy High School community

I am thrilled to be back in the chair as Principal of our great school after a very interesting and successful “Gap Year”. I refer you to Andrea Thompson’s Acting Principal report of December 2023 and thank her profoundly for the work she did last year. I also wish her all the best for her Acting Principal role at Richmond High School this term. I also wish to thank and acknowledge Margaret Doucas, Paul Cahill and Lucy Marshall, who acted as Assistant Principals during 2023. Paul and Lucy are continuing the role this term while Andrea is away, while Margaret has taken up an important role as leading the DE’s Disability and Inclusion reform on behalf of the school.

Andrea mentioned staff who were leaving the school at the end of last year and thanked them for their service. I would like to make special mention of Ross McDonald, who was our Business Manager for seven years and who played an extremely important role in setting up the Wurun Senior Campus. I know that the School Council also posted on Compass at the end of last year about Ross’ contributions.

As Andrea also mentioned in her December report, we are welcoming several new staff: Ned Daniher, Julian Maes, Leah Christou, Olivia Meisel, Inger Ross and Kate Marshall. Since this report we have also welcomed Matt Davidson, VCE Psychology teacher at Wurun, Zoran Vasic, VCE Applied Computing and Science teacher, Ruby Pettigrew, Digital Technology teacher, Eloise Callaghan and Ryan Grant, new inclusion staff. We will also be appointing a new Humanities and English teacher at the 7-10 campus as Ned Daniher was successful in his appointment to the Year 12 Leader at Wurun. We wish all of these staff all the best and warmly welcome them to our community.

This is the year of our new Strategic Plan after last year’s review and I look forward to sharing more details about that in the next newsletter. Many members of the school community worked on the review and I would like to thank them for their efforts. One of most important and exciting aspects of the review, as well as the new Strategic Plan, is that we are working more closely than ever with Collingwood College, not only in our unique partnership at Wurun Senior Campus, but also in our secondary schools more generally, looking at ways that we can improve student outcomes and build staff capacity. We have begun already by jointly analysing student outcome data from year 7 to 12 at both schools, and thinking about how we can collaborate to improve our student outcomes and to make each student’s year 7 to 12 journey more seamless. More of that to come over the course of the year.

As you will see from the other reports, so much has happened already this year, including camps, excursions, assemblies, sports, clubs, as well as important curriculum initiatives.

On Monday February 26, we will be sending you via Compass an invitation to nominate for School Council, whether as a parent member, staff member or student member. I urge you to consider nominating yourself or someone else and contributing to our school community.

Warm regards

Linda Mitchell, Principal