Welcome

So we commence another year at Hills Grammar. Year 37 in our proud history.

Welcome back to all returning students, staff and parents and a very warm welcome to all those who join our community for the first time. I am always confident that new members of our community are made to feel welcome and we look forward to sharing the Hills Grammar story, culture and accomplishments with you, and to having you add your own unique stories, strengths, priorities and talents to your school.

We commence the year with the highest enrolment in four years, settling at 920 students K to 12 with our very successful 79 place Early Childhood Education Centre fully subscribed. As we grow toward our preferred school size of 1160 (K to 12) in 2019 we will have four streams in Kindergarten, Year 1, Year 4 and we have restored the four streams to Years 7, 9 and 10. To ensure that our increased numbers this year and into the future are well catered for we continue to transform the environment (natural, built, human, culture) as a unique learning environment from which our students will benefit through the quality teaching and learning experiences such an environment facilitates.

Many staff worked over the December / January period to ensure all was in readiness for the students return this week. An enormous amount of building work has been undertaken during the holiday in JS1, JS2, JS4, NEXUS, Mallik Centre, Year 12 Common Room and new furniture for Years 1, 4 and English has been purchased with more to come later this year for Languages and Mathematics. There is still a way to go with some of the building projects and we look forward to sharing the new facilities with you in due course and to achieving the improvements for which the changes were designed. Another significant change has been the replacement of the School’s old and outdated database with a more contemporary, efficient and effective alternative – Synergetic. Synergetic will allow us to achieve more in terms of data collection, communication and connections with current, past and future Hills Grammarians. Please be patient as we identify any teething problems as our building works conclude, as our database implementation continues and draw our attention to anything you notice that is not working as you think it should – your feedback is very welcome!

Thank you to the staff who have been overseeing this work during December and January which of course also occurred on top of the big clean-up of the campus after the storms just before Christmas; during which we lost about 30 trees – with no significant damage, but certainly a big effort to clear the campus and make it safe.

The purpose of this first brief newsletter is simply to welcome you all to the 2019 school year, briefly touch base and provide you with some further start up information. We look forward to seeing you often this year and sharing our focus and priorities for 2019. It will be an exciting year with so many new families and colleagues joining us and as such there in a lot to look forward to, and to do on behalf of our students, your children.

Michael Smith | Principal

Twitter: @Principal_Hills