You will all know that Cheryl Bryers announced her retirement earlier in the year to take effect at the end of 2018. We have lots of plans to celebrate and commemorate Cheryl’s dedicated service to the College but in the meantime I wanted to announce Cheryl’s successor.

After an expansive search, shortlist and interview process I am very pleased to announce that our new Head of Primary to start in 2019 will be Gail Mitchell.

Gail has fulfilled the Assistant Head of Primary role since 2013 at the College and has done a superb job. She has an intimate knowledge of all facets of the primary school logistically speaking, the staff, students and parents. She has spearheaded many curriculum initiatives during that time and has fostered the curriculum initiatives of others. She is someone who embodies all of our GREAT values and is a passionate educator.

As Cheryl leaves us there are big shoes left to fill, but I have every confidence that Gail will continue in the tradition of the GREAT legacy that Cheryl has left and lead the Primary College through to the next exciting chapter of our development.

GCC Pay 4 Hay and “Fill it for a Farmer”

Before there was a whisper of the current drought on TV or social media our Head of Agricultural Science Jade King, came to me telling me about the problem and how our Agricultural Science students wanted to raise funds to help out the affected farmers.

The students called the project Pay 4 Hay and this seed of an idea quickly germinated into a fundraiser that generated more than $20,000 of assistance going directly to the farmers.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been watching how the rest of the College jumped on board with the vision and am very proud of the compassion, creativity and efforts of our students and community.

Many of you will know that we have adopted the rural town of Warialda in New South Wales as recipients for the funds. There were two main reasons for this. The first is because these farmers had hosted our GCC Agricultural Science students in the past and generously donated their time and skills to help their learning. The second reason was that because of this relationship, we learned first-hand how tough the farmers were doing it down there. What better way to return the favour than the GCC Pay 4 Hay project!

Our local farmers have also thrown their full support behind this project with wonderful men like John Allen donating a truck and his time as driver to get the first load of hay to Warialda. The first truck arrived last week and there were literally tears of gratitude. By this stage the focus had turned from just feeding the stock to actually feeding the farmers.

Another local farmer, Henry Agostinelli has been instrumental in securing a paddock of good quality grass that we can have cut and baled to produce up to 500 large round bales for Warialda.

We were also blessed with an incredible donation of $7,000 from Beerwah Community and Recycling and Iolar Operational Services which really helped kick start the fund raising! Thanks also to Glasshouse Country News who chose the Pay 4 Hay project for the cover page of their paper on 15 August.

The “Fill it for a Farmer” project was quickly taken up by our Primary classes who collected food and groceries for the farmers in Warialda. This generosity is such a blessing to the farmers. Jade tells of one farmer asking his visitors to bring their own coffee and tea as the pantry was completely bare! Jade took down some of these donations last week and the rest will go down in Week 10 with the Year 11 Agricultural Science students who are donating sweat equity to help where they can.

As well as the ‘Pay 4 Hay’ and ‘Fill it for a Farmer’, we also had ‘Fiver for a Farmer’ with pizza and drink plus the hot chocolate and raisin toast sales, Hospitality Café donations, cupcake sales and a fresh farm produce sale – all for the farmers!

Another welcome donation came from Ariana Doolan’s work as a National Finalist for Australia’s Teen Queen. Ariana adopted the Pay 4 Hay as her community service project and received a cheque for $2,000 from Paul Purcell.

Jade King has written and update on the first delivery of supplies in her article in this week’s Eagle. You can read all about it here.

The Go Fund Me GCC PAY4HAY account is still receiving donations so if you can help or know of someone who may be interested, please share this article on one of the social media options at the bottom of this page.

Disturbing news about our 10kmph limit

There have been alarming reports of cars exceeding the 10kmph limit on our campus grounds. This is a very disturbing situation as the limit of 10kmph is there for a very important reason. Children have limited road-safety consciousness, spatial awareness and experience so it is the drivers’ responsibility to be on the lookout for them.

I noticed that this is happening particularly before the morning drop off and after the afternoon pick up. Just because there is not a lot of traffic at these times does not mean the 10kmph speed limit can be ignored. The speed limit is not just for the peak times but for every single minute you are driving on campus.

With after school care and lots of extra-curricular activities, children are on campus at all times these days. They are even less likely to be prepared for cars before and after school so this makes it even more vital to obey the 10kmph limit at all times.

You are endangering young people’s lives if you speed through the campus. Let’s all work together to make Glasshouse Christian College a safe place for our students.

Mike Curtis, Principal