RAISING LEADERS In Senior School, our desire is to raise leaders...
We are passionate about raising leaders within our community and will continue to develop our students to lead as Christ-like servants with their heads, hearts, and hands.
Over the past few years, the Senior School team have been working on a leadership program that seeks to train, develop and encourage our students to actively step into leadership wherever they are: within our community, within the classroom and beyond. Our leadership development consists of three important and related elements: training, service, and mission. Training helps develop our student leaders for lives of service both within and beyond the school community that in turn encourages a commitment to mission both within and beyond the school community. The goal of leadership development in the Senior School is to foster a missional culture through the equipping and encouragement of student leaders with servant heads, hearts and hands. We seek to teach students the fundamental biblical elements of leadership (head), develop within students a heart for, and love of, leading others (heart), while also, most importantly, enabling them to live lives of service to others (hands). Our intention is to help our students see Christian leadership as simply living lives of service in response to the gospel of Jesus Christ that recognises others as created in the image of God and in need of His saving grace.
Our current School Captains penned their vision for our community for 2021 in our local newspaper, the Hills Shire Times. We feel that it is appropriate to share this with you and thank God for His guidance in creating this leadership program which encourages our students to develop servant heads, hearts, and hands. “There is no doubt that last year will go down in the history books as the year where the whole world stopped; where we were forced as the human race to pause, people lost jobs, businesses died, some people thrived, others barely survived. But now, as the 2021 Captains of Pacific Hills Christian School, we look forward as the unexpected awaits. Although we don’t know, and cannot control what the future holds, we can control how we lead, how we learn and how we serve others in our school community and beyond. Many of us are simply waiting for life to return to normal - as we understood it before Covid-19. We, as the Captains, believe that this season can be transformed for good; that we can use the craziness of our situation to build our community. Last year we saw our school community join together and support each other in many ways and we want to continue to build on this. So, for the year ahead we propose that we should not return to the normal we knew, but instead, unite together as a school community who brings hope, speaks in love and acts with kindness and compassion.” (Zac Farr, Rachel Dearden, Matthew Brisbane and Olivia Langton)
In Senior School, students are encouraged to actively, yet informally, lead as they serve each day in Pastoral Care groups, in classes and during the year on Community Service Days and Missions. Formally, opportunities exist as Peer Support leaders in Years 10/11 and as Prefects in Years 11/12. Other opportunities are currently being created for students in Years 9 and 10, with a Year Group Student Leadership team and an ‘Introduction to Leadership’ program in Year 10.
GREG DRISCOLL & JO LAPOINTE Pacific Hills - Senior School
15
