I am delighted to inform that we have appointed Ruth O’Dwyer as our new Upper Primary Turtles teacher at our Rockingham Primary School site. Both the Turtles and Dugongs classes will remain as a combined class at this stage whilst Ruth acclimatises to RMS and gets to know all her Turtles children. Ruth has a wealth of knowledge with this age of children and we look forward to supporting Ruth while she completes the last of her Montessori studies.
It is with great sadness I inform that Stella Onderwater will be finishing with RMS at the end of this term. Stella helped with the establishment of the Adolescent Program in 2012 in her role as Education Assistant and has seen the AP grow from twelve students to the one hundred and five that we have today. When we commenced the AP we were housed on the second floor of the university in three small classrooms and then in 2016 we moved to our current location on the third floor where we had our two large open classrooms. Sadly, Stella will not be coming with us on our new journey to Port Kennedy however she has been instrumental in our planning for this site. For the past four years, Stella has been studying Art Therapy and we wish her every success in her new path to assist people through this innovative therapeutic approach. Thank you Stella for your dedication and commitment to the School and more particularly our burgeoning adults. We will miss your amazing sense of humour and your wealth of knowledge and guidance.
It was wonderful to see a group of our RMS mothers who have joined the Flourish Program that has been running at our Karnup site over the past two weeks. This free program is run by career councillors and is designed to help mums return to the workforce and runs over eight weeks. It is not too late to put your name down for the second round of this program which starts on Tuesday 30 August. Please contact Kendal Drew at kendal@strategiccm.com.au to register your place or to find out more information https://strategiccareers.com.au/contact/ .
We were delighted to win a PALS (Partnerships Acceptance Learning Sharing) grant this week. Over the next two years, this grant will support the enrichment of our indigenous languages program across the school. The National Reconciliation Week 2022 theme was “Be Brave. Make Change.” RMS has taken this challenge to tackle the unfinished business of reconciliation so we can Make Change for the benefit of our children and all Australians. With this funding, we will continue the Noongar naming protocol across all sites and aspects of our school to recognise and pay tribute to our First Nations people. In 2021 Tanya Bennell worked with the adolescent students to rename their advisories with Noongar animal names and at the Port Kennedy site, we named our classrooms with Noongar names of native flora. I am pleased to advise at our Rockingham site, the Children’s House Garden at the front of the school will be renamed the Koolangkara Garden which translates to “Children’s Garden”.
Over the coming terms, you will see a transformation of this play area that will enhance the hard-court area for our youngest children. They will be able to use the bikes and scooters to further develop their gross motor skills whilst weaving in and out of the bush tucker garden. An instrumental step in reconciliation is the recognition and integration of the language of our Indigenous people.