INTERNATIONAL LITERACY DAY

ST GREGORY’S COLLEGE Events

Parent Engagement

Mrs Ally Buckley - Parent Engagement Coordinator

Marcellin Champagnat valued a sense of ‘Family Spirit’, and we work hard to ensure that it is experienced by all families at St Gregory’s College.

Keeping our parents connected and informed is critical as our Parent Forums allow face to face communication to be shared by our teaching staff along with parent engagement with opportunities for questions and feedback to the College.

Listening to our parent community brings with it growth and strategic thought, witnessed, even more, this year as we embraced technology and moved our

Parent Forums into a mix of face to face and online capacities. The Q&A features online allowed parents to still participate with questions and allowed us to record the forums and share them via YouTube for parents to view at a convenient time. This online capacity allowed for a larger number of parents to participate along with more connections from our Boarding families.

A focus for our forums is to share with parents relevant and topical insights. Some highlights for 2021 included a detailed exploration of the PYP Programme in the Junior School and a presentation on Drug Use relating to e-Cigarettes and Vaping in Australian

Lockdown mummies

teenagers by Mr Vetrano and Mr O’Brien for the Senior School.

We are so lucky to have such a huge parent volunteer army at St Gregory’s which directly benefits our students. Parent volunteers were welcomed into the College at the start of the year for the College Open Day, Swimming Carnival, Cross Country, classroom helping and banking all of which would not have been possible without the help from our parents. Unfortunately, due to COVID restrictions volunteers were greatly missed at the College in Terms 3 and 4. St Gregory’s College places enormous value on our parents being part of our community, especially sharing in events with their sons and daughters. We commenced our year off with the ever-popular Mother’s Day Breakfast for K-6, Years 7 and Year 8. We hosted our inaugural Family Trivia Night with the evening bringing together family teams in a night of fun, laugher, games and woodfired pizza. We loved having families join us during the day to share a picnic for Lunch on the Lawn. We also invited Year 10 boys and their parents to their first family evening that included art and sporting activities. Families participated

in a lesson delivered by our Art staff, which involved lots of experimenting and working together using straws to blow coloured and iridescent inks to create abstract artwork. The evening concluded with dinner in the Boarders’ Dining Hall, and each family leaving with a memento, their abstract artwork! The evening was a fabulous night for the boys and their families.

COVID-19 put a grinding halt to hosting families onsite at the College, but we were still able to come together for a K-12 Virtual Trivia evening with families joining in the crazy spirit by dressing up. Although it was online, there was much fun and congratulations to the winners on the night;

1st Place The Cocco Family

2nd Place The Gould Family

1st Place Fancy Dress ‘Lockdown

Mummies’ The Degeling Family 2021 brought with it many challenges that required our students to be agile and required parents to be ‘teachers’, as online learning was introduced for Term 3 and part of Term 4. The College is greatly appreciative of the care and patience shown by our parents for their amazing contribution and support as we all juggled this new environment. We certainly are blessed with a wonderful community at St Gregory’s and we all look forward to having our parents back onsite in 2022.

“The College is greatly appreciative of the care and patience shown by our parents for their amazing contribution and support …”

Virtual Familly Trivia Virtual Familly Trivia