29 July 2024

Dear Parents and Carers

Thank you to those of you who participated in the feedback meetings held recently. My team and I are looking forward to the report our consultant will provide us as it is important to us to know what we can do to make your Calvary experience even better. For those of you who wanted to provide feedback but missed the opportunity, a survey form coming from our marketing team that will give you a chance to contribute. These links are also pasted here:

Springwood
https://forms.office.com/r/0P1Zd6qPtB

Carbrook Junior School
https://forms.office.com/r/Pw1VxMenpz

Cabrook Middle Senior School
https://forms.office.com/r/pjbzkgBQQ5

This is the exciting time of year when the Executive Leadership Team looks at preparations for 2025. With our ‘better tomorrow than today’ mindset, our attention is always focused on how we can make things better, and as we begin our planning for 2025, we look at what we can implement for next year. I shared with you last week that one of those things is the changes I am making to our leadership structure and allocation of talent to task. Please pray for wisdom for the interview panels involved.

Nelmari (Claassen) has served our Springwood campus faithfully as Head of Community and Wellbeing since 2019. She has made the decision to continue at Springwood as a Senior Teacher from January 2025. I appreciate the decision she has made at this point in her career as she seeks to balance her career and family commitments, both here and in South Africa.  Nelmari has fulfilled her role with its focus on community and wellbeing in an exemplary manner, both in her support of Kim’s leadership of the campus and her extensive experience in pastoral care and student wellbeing. I am delighted that she is not lost to the Springwood community, and we will all still benefit from her professional expertise. For the rest of this year, Nelmari will continue to hold this role, and I am confident she will do all she can to make the transition to the next incumbent as smooth as possible.

Nelmari’s decision makes this position vacant, and in accordance with our EBA and College recruitment policy, the role is being advertised both externally and internally. This advertisement can be found on our College website and on SEEK.

We love it when our parent body helps us do even better by our students. As the netball season draws to a close I want to thank the parents who took the Underwood Park Netball teams through a successful season with the coaching, administration tasks and team management that required. This gave our young people a ‘beyond’ school netball experience to complement the in-school netball program.

I am excited to share with you that another group of parents is volunteering to bring cricket back to the Carbrook campus. After the 2022 floods, when we lost our oval, I made sure the cricket pitch was part of the rebuild of the oval facilities, and we retained the infrastructure for the cricket nets. My hope has been that one day these will be put to good use, and that day has come! I am excited to see students engaging in cricket type play at breaks – even when they utilise a rubbish bin as wicket keeper behind their plastic portable wickets and play on a narrow strip of grass against a building! I am looking forward to seeing them use re-established cricket facilities.

Please remember to sign up to attend one of the Principal Events coming soon (LINK). The presentation of ‘Calvary for 2025’ will be the same at each event so feel free to select the campus closest to your home and the time most convenient to your circumstances. We are ONE COLLEGE on TWO CAMPUSES and want you to enjoy the many benefits that come with our locations. 

This month, the Business Manager and I work with the Executive Team to prepare the budget for 2025 and, like you, we are feeling the burden of unavoidable rising costs. Our College Council works with us in the establishment of the budget, our aim always being to ensure good stewardship of our resources in ways that benefit our families. We will be sharing with you the fee schedule for 2025 before the end of this term. As always, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with our Business Manager and his team if you find yourself experiencing a season of financial hardship.

On that note, something we are working on is taking our uniform supplies in-house and offering you what we hope will be a more cost effective and time efficient service. From the start of 2025, we will be managing uniform supplies and sales. I hope to share more about this with you in August when we meet as well as through communications later this year. I also thank you for your patience and support as we have navigated the challenges of uniform supply, teenage ‘fashion adaptations’ of our uniform policy and the unusual cold weather with its impact on a uniform designed for typical Queensland conditions!

Thank you for your ongoing support of our College. As always, we seek to serve you informed by our College value EXCELLENCE. We will always give you our ‘stretch best’ at any given moment.

Yours sincerely

Cherylynne Gostelow