The David Williamson Writing Competition
I am extremely excited to introduce the David Williamson writing competition to Elevation Secondary College this year. David Williamson has been Australia’s premier playwright since the 1970’s and has been responsible for writing and producing dozens of plays and screenplays including Don’s Party, The Club and Gallipoli. David has generously agreed to partner with Elevation and sponsor this new event.
This new, annual competition, will aim to find the best up and coming writers within our school community with significant cash prizes for the category and overall winners.
There’s still some time for students to enter in any of the categories of Poetry, Short Story, Play or Script, with this years theme: ‘No place like home’ .
The overall winner will receive ‘The Williamson Prize’ which also includes $500 prize and runner’s up will receive: Outstanding Poem: $200, Outstanding Short Story: $200, Outstanding Script or Play: $200, plus Year Level Prizes.
Deadline for all submissions is the 17th of June at 4:30pm, and students should submit any draft form (i.e. plan, draft, brainstorm etc.) by the 3rd of June.
Handwritten submissions must be placed in the box- located at the library.
Electronic submissions must use and submitted as a Google Docs file via the library portal.
For any questions or help in this competition, students can contact any of the following English teachers who have graciously volunteered to run the competition: Mr Fielding, Ms Francis, Mr Poulakis, Ms Wheaton, Ms Zuk, Mr Hanlon or Ms Stephens.
Classroom & Facilities Expansion
Relocatables
Students and many community members will have noticed quite a few building works going on at the school in recent weeks. We are currently installing 3 new relocatable buildings, which will give us 5 additional classrooms once finished. These classrooms will help to ease some of the capacity issues we have been dealing with since opening. I’m hoping to have some more news to share shortly about further changes and additions to our classroom spaces.
Masterplan
In the meantime, we are finalizing the planning of our new masterplan for future development. Once finished, the masterplan (which has been created by Brand architects) will allow the school to plan and advocate for future facilities and building expansion works for the school, so that we can continue to develop an improved educational facility over the next 5 – 10 years.
Building Fund
In support of this as well, the Elevation Secondary College School Council has established a Building Fund where community members and businesses can make tax deductible donations to the school, in support of future building works at the school. Communication will go home shortly via Compass with details of the building fund.
Traffic & Parking Improvements from Hume City Council Coming
Thanks to advocacy by school community members and the Elevation Secondary College School Council, I have been notified by Hume Council that infrastructure amendments will be made near our school on Elevation Boulevard. These improvements will greatly help student safety and include measures to improve approach sight distance, reduce crossing distance, provide a staged crossing , consolidate walking lines and extend school speed limits.
Design works will start soon and works are scheduled to be completed in either the 2024/5 Financial year or 2025/6 Financial year.
Until these mitigation works are completed I would continue to ask families to take great care when driving and parking near the school, especially at drop off and pick up times.
Real Trade Training Opportunities for Our Students
Last newsletter I wrote about the new Build10 program which a number of our year 10 students are participating in this year. This one of a kind program allows these students to attend Kangan TAFE two days a week as part of their year 10 program and complete a Certificate II in Building and Construction by the end of year 10 – two full years earlier than usual!
Just last week Mr Schutz and myself were able to visit some of our students in the program at Kangan, visit their classroom spaces and amazing construction workshop. I was very impressed with the amazing facilities, great teaching staff and also our students in the program – who are standing out as great performers within the program.
This genuine – industry based program is an amazing opportunity for our students to accelerate their careers and employment prospects while remaining at school.
I’m very excited to see how we can work with Kangan in coming years to expand this project to other trades and industries.
Colin Burke