Principal’s Report

Dear Fortians, Parents and Carers,

It has been wonderful having the whole school back together again after such a long time learning from home. Seeing our students fill classrooms, engaged in their learning, excited and happy to be together has been uplifting. Whilst we still maintained our obligation to focus on our core business of teaching and learning it was important in the first week back to also focus on re-establishing ‘normality’ and the wellbeing of our entire school community.

In these past two weeks we have operated under Level 3 Plus restrictions. From Monday 8 November we will move to Level 3 restrictions. The updated Level 3 settings aim to balance the risk of COVID-19 transmission among cohorts with a layered approach to COVID safety on school sites and to meet expectations for closer alignment to community settings.

All students are now expected to be at school unless they are unwell. Please do not send your child to school if unwell, even with mild symptoms. If a student or staff member has any COVID-19 symptoms, they will be sent home and must not return to school unless they have either isolated for 10 days or can present a negative COVID-19 test result and are symptom free. In circumstances where a student has other medical reasons for recurrent symptoms, a letter from your GP is sufficient to negate the requirement for a negative test.

Further learning from home to support HSC students’ complete exams safely

In week 6, the HSC exams commence on Tuesday 9 November. Year 12, please know that the whole school community is behind you. We are very proud of all that you have achieved, and we wish you every success for the HSC. For the large exams we will need to have some year groups learning from home to enable us to implement the COVID guidelines set by NESA so that we can safely run the HSC exams.

Tuesday 9 November

• Years 7, 8 and 10 will be learning from home on this day. Students in these year groups will follow their regular timetabled periods for the day except for Year 10 who will need to complete the All My Own Work modules during the schedules sport periods that day.
• Year 9 students will be at school on this day completing their Year 9 Duke of Edinburgh Adventurous Journey
• Year 11 will follow normal timetabled lessons face to face at school

Wednesday 10 November

• Years 7, 8 and 10 will be learning from home on this day following their usual timetable.
• Year 9 students will be at school on this day continuing their Year 9 Duke of Edinburgh Adventurous Journey
• Year 11 will follow normal timetabled lessons face to face at school

Monday 15 November

• Year 8, 9 and 10 will be learning from home on this day following their usual timetable
• Year 7 will follow normal timetabled lessons face to face at school
• Year 11 will complete the Minimum Standards Tests at school periods 1-4 and regular face to face lessons p5 and p6.

Friday 19 November

• Years 7, 8, 9 and 10 will be learning from home on this day following their usual timetable
• Year 11 will follow normal timetabled lessons face to face at school

COVID-safe measures at school

To provide a safe learning environment for students and staff, we will continue with our cohort model to reduce interaction between students in different groups and to minimise interaction between students on school grounds.

• All activities will minimise mixing and mingling between year groups
• Each year group has been allocated their own space for breaks
• Start and finish times as well as break times will continue to be staggered
• Sport will continue to operate under the return to school model of PDHPE classes with only one year group accessing sport at any given time
• Students are encouraged to maintain strict personal hygiene and to physically distance wherever possible
• The library, school hall and other communal areas will continue to be used by only one cohort at a time with adherence to physical distancing requirements

All staff are fully vaccinated and all parents and carers, volunteers and providers who are permitted to come onto school grounds must also be fully vaccinated.

Masks remain a requirement indoors for all staff, visitors, and students.

What happens if there is a COVID-19 case at school?

The department has updated its response protocols for COVID-19 cases, with detailed guidance for parents and carers about what will happen should there be a confirmed case of COVID-19 at school and students are identified as a close or casual contact. NSW Health will notify the school if there is a positive COVID-19 case who has been infectious while at school and we will in turn notify parents and carers. Contact tracing will be undertaken as it is in all other venues. The action we take in relation to the operation of the school will depend on how many people the person has been in contact with. In some cases, this may mean that the school may need to be made temporarily non-operational. Some staff ands students may be asked to self-isolate as a precaution while contact tracing is completed.

World Teachers’ Day

Our teachers at Fort Street are a wonderful team who make a difference educating and inspiring our students. World Teachers’ Day is an opportunity to acknowledge our teachers and say thanks for the significant contributions they make. The theme of this years World Teachers’ Day was ‘teachers at the heart of education recovery’. It aimed to recognise the tireless effort of teachers to keep lessons going over the course of the pandemic.

Our newly elected SRC created a message wall last week in the Kilgour Quad with beautiful and thoughtful messages from our students to their teachers. On behalf of our school community, thank you to all our wonderful teachers for everything you do.

SRC

Dear Fort Street Community,

As we finish our first week of face-to-face learning, things are starting to get back to ‘normal’…well the ‘new normal’. After a prolonged 4-month lockdown and staring at a screen for 6 hours each day, students can no longer wake up at 8:40 am and log on to their zoom classes in pyjamas. There is a lot of uncertainty with how we are moving forward, however, it is crucial that everyone considers the wellbeing and mental health of the people around them, but more importantly, of yourselves. It is vital we support each other, especially young people, during this transitional stage.

Fortians with freshly ironed shirts entered the Fort Street High School gates, for a staggered start, some thrilled to see their friends, whilst others had mixed feelings. It was exciting to see everyone together— students, teachers, staff— and to finally feel a sense of community. I would like to commend the past executive team of 2020-21 for all their hard work and adaptability over the past year, especially organising the online Future’s Leaders Week amidst lockdown. There’s no doubt lockdown has had an impact on us all, but the SRC is looking forward to improving the sense of school community over the coming year.

This update will outline recent SRC business and introduce the new SRC team for 2021-22!

Teacher Appreciation Day
Last Friday (29/10/21), was Teacher Appreciation Day and in the light of our lockdown, the SRC wanted to do something nice for the teachers. The SRC sent out a form to the school, where students could submit sweet messages to teachers. We created a message wall in the upper Kilgour quad where the messages were hung up. Thank you to all the staff and teachers for their hard work!

SRC Elections
This year’s SRC elections were held online, with candidates submitting 30-second videos for their cohort to view. Eight members were elected from each year group. Congratulations to the newly elected SRC members for 2021-2022, I can’t wait to see what we achieve!

SRC Camp
On Friday the 15th of October, the SRC members from 2020-21 and 2021-22 attended an online “SRC Camp” during remote learning. We reviewed our achievements over the year and had the opportunity to bond with the rest of the SRC, with the main goal of a smooth transition between the two teams. Presidential speeches were also made during this “camp”, with speeches to the staff and the Year 10 cohort made earlier in the week.

Junior and Executive SRC roles
During our first SRC meeting, we held junior role elections which give junior SRC members the opportunity to have more responsibility and involvement within the SRC. The executive SRC members also discussed their executive roles for the rest of the year. Congratulations to our 2021/22 SRC team, results are listed below (note: junior and executive roles are included)

Overall, I am looking forward to building Fort Street’s school spirit and can’t wait to work with the SRC and wider school community. Thank you for this amazing leadership opportunity, I can’t want to see what the coming year brings!

Do you have any feedback and ideas on any school related business? As always, we would love to hear from you! Please contact your friendly SRC via email (srcfshs@gmail.com), Instagram (@srcfshs as of 29/10/21 – this may change) or simply let one of our members know.

Stay safe and take care!

Alyssa Khaw
SRC President
Year 10

UWS Kirby Cup

In the final weeks of online learning, two teams of Fort Street students came together to represent the school in the UWS law moot “Kirby Cup” competition. As the competition is named in honour of our esteemed Fortian former Justice of the High Court Michael Kirby, it was paramount that we give our best to the competition. Team Fort Street 1 comprising of Jade Do, Vivian Le, Hannah Liao and Ethan Nguyen in year 11 worked exceptionally hard on preparation for the competition despite the challenges of working from home. The team showed expert knowledge of the mooting materials and made it to the final 8 round of the competition.  Team Fort Street 2 comprising of Audrey Truong, Andy Chen, Daniel Holland and Peter Tran in year 11 advanced to the top two in the preliminary round. The students had limited time to prepare for the moot and showed astounding effort and commitment. We congratulate Audrey, Andy, Daniel and Peter on reaching the semi-finals to be held on Friday 8 November. What an incredible effort on their second day of return to face to face learning! Semi-finalists were also awarded conditional law degree offers from UWS and the opportunity for feedback and mentoring from UWS lecturers during the competition. We hope to see more Fortians participate in mooting in the future. With thanks to Mr O’Neill and Ms Xu for supervising students during the competition.

From Compulsory Fun Learning Online to now Compulsory Fun Learning Face to Face in the Classroom

With our spectacular return to face to face learning at Fort Street this week, I would just like to acknowledge the efforts of Year 9 and 8 students with maintaining their focus and engagement throughout their study of English online for the past 13 weeks. To keep motivated, these students competed in the Compulsory Fun Learning Competition invented by Ms Truong, where they could earn points during every Video Conference Call via Microsoft Teams by turning on their camera and participating in verbal conversations about various concepts from texts such as Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Poetry from the Romanticism Literary Periods and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Each week, they were also challenged to compose a variety of critical writing and creative writing and drawing activities and the results also contributed to this competition. We also had a bit of dressing up fun where students earned additional points if they turned on the camera and wore hats or shirts that matched that week’s colour theme! When we returned to face-to-face teaching this week, the top 10 students of every class were awarded merit awards and prizes; many of them managed to impressively achieve an accumulative score from the entirity of term 3 and the first three weeks of term 4 of over 1,000 points!!! The best reward is of course, the fact that they kept honing their critical and creative thinking skills even during lockdown and now they can continue applying it to their learning for the final lap of the Year 9 and 8 English courses and beyond.

House Names

As part of a restructure of the House system, we are planning to introduce a fifth House to the school next year.

We would like to take this opportunity to re-consider the names of the current houses, and to invite submissions from students to help decide the names of all five School Houses.

Students may submit individual House names or a complete set of five complementary names. Students are free to suggest that we keep some, all or none of the current names. For each name suggested, students should include a brief paragraph (no more than 100 words) on why each name would be suitable. Proposed names should reflect some aspect of the school’s history, geography, culture or values.

Proposals should be submitted to fortstreet-h.school@det.nsw.edu.au by 3:00pm Friday 12 November. Prizes will be awarded to the best submissions. The school’s executive will be responsible for deciding the final House names, with input from students, staff and the Fort Street community.

As a starting point, you might like to consider or draw inspiration from the list of 20 Notable Fortians, prepared by School Archivist Mr Iain Wallace.

20 FORTIANS WHO SHAPED THE NATION

The Innovators

Pioneers who have influenced future generations

• John Yu
• Hermann Black
• Nalini Joshi
• Margaret Preston

The Resilient

Those who have survived despite adversity

• Douglas Mawson
• Clarice Kennedy
• Ian Cohen

The Spirited

Those who reveal a typically ‘Australian’ quality

• Norman Hetherington
• D. Hope
• Jan Stephenson
• Harry Hopman
• Charlie Macartney
• Rob Porter

The Curious

Inquisitive individuals who have challenged the staus quo

• Mary Kostakidis
• Elaine Henry
• Margaret Burgess
• Michael Kirby

The Revolutionaries

Those who have caused a dramatic change in history

• Edmund Barton
• John Kerr
• Dr HV Evatt

A Brief History of Fort Street Houses

House systems were introduced to both the Boys and Girls schools in 1945. The Sports Master at the Boys school wrote this in the 1945 Fortian Magazine:

The House System divides the school into four smaller High Schools which compete with each other… Each House has its own Captain and a vice-captain in charge of each sport, also its own house recorder at the Athletics and Swimming Carnivals. At the last Athletic carnival, House “War-cries,” cheer-leaders and coaches were very prominent…

There shall be four Houses – Chrismas, Kilgour, Mearns and Williams [former Principals of the school], comprising respectively all the boys in the School Rolls classified according to surnames… The Rose Cup is awarded to the champion House in all sport.

In the same year, 5^th Form Student Jill Jefferson wrote about the formation of Houses at the Girls school:

The idea of having School Houses had long been simmering in the minds of every new group of Fifth Year girls, and this year definite action was taken.

The Fifths were expected to suggest the names of the Houses, and for days there were hot discussions about them. Some suggested the names of Australian explorers, others wanted aboriginal names; then the names of the streets adjacent to the School were suggested, as were the names of certain Royal houses.

Finally a compromise was made between the last two suggestions and the names of the houses were settled… blue for Bradfield, green for Gloucester, scarlet for Kent and gold for York.

In 1975, the year the Boys and Girls schools were united on the current site, the Fortian records the Houses as Casanova, Maralinga, Fonzie, Newcombe and Elswick, but in 1980 the school felt the need to re-design the School Houses again.

This year saw the reintroduction of the house system which had not been used since 1975 when the two schools amalgamated. At an assembly, Mr. Horan announced a “moment that would go down in history” and proceeded to read out names of past Fortians to be allocated to the six houses previously referred to as A, B, C, D, E, F.

The six houses were Bannon (purple), Barton (green), Hunter (orange), Mackness (blue), Mawson (yellow) and Preston (red). Those House names were still in use in 1991, but by 1993 the six Houses had been reduced to four and were known simply by their colours. The current House names date from 1998 when Barton (blue), Mawson (red) and Preston (yellow) were resurrected and Kennedy (green) was introduced for the first time.

Rumours of a secretive fifth house, Hetherington (black) have never been substantiated.

Careers in STEM webinars

Free Webinar Series:
Meet a role model – Careers in STEM

What do an earth scientist, mathematician, ecologist and astrophysicist all have in common?

They are all part of the Careers in STEM – Role Model webinar series that STELR is running in Term 4 2021.

The weekly series gives students the opportunity to meet Australian scientists and engineers as role models, enabling them to be engaged and inspired through discussions and moderated Q&A sessions. Aimed at Years 5-12, the focus of the webinars is to show the varied routes to STEM careers and the diversity of work that is carried out.

Speakers – Term 4 2021

11 Nov – Dr Erin Hahn – Conservation Genetics
“Would you like to time travel?”

16 Nov – Dr Hannah Robinson (Barley Breeder) & A/Prof Charlie Warren (Plant & Soil Biologist)
“From little thing, big things grow”

23 Nov – Dr Michelle Hall – Physiotherapy Researcher
“Keep on Moving”

25 Nov – A/Prof Roslyn Hickson – Mathematician
“Using Math to solve real world problems”

30 Nov – Dr Ayesha Tulloch – Conservation Scientist
“Conserving our future”

9 Dec – Dr Tayyaba Zafar – Astrophysicist & Astronomer
“Reach for the stars”

REGISTER NOW for as many sessions as you would like!

For further information visit our events page www.stelr.org.au/about/events or email stelr.admin@atse.org.au

Are you a Girl Geek?

Microsoft Mondays

Ready to learn amazing things and make some new friends? Girl Geek Academy and Microsoft have teamed up to present weekly online workshops to high school girls interested in coding and technology.

Designed specifically for high school girls, you’ll hang out, meet new mates, and learn a new tech skill every Monday afternoon from 5:00-6:30pm (AEDT), totally free.

Keen on making your own video game? Let’s do it. Got code questions? We’ve got you covered. Curious about Artificial Intelligence? So are we.

All the classes are beginner friendly, and are set up so you can go at your own pace – no need to worry about getting left behind. And if you’re tech talented, you can move ahead as fast as you like.

Find out more and register here: https://girlgeekacademy.com/microsoft/

Face Masks for sale

On Sale Now!

Fort Street Face Mask.

An Australian-made three-layer washable cloth mask, with a microfibre layer on the outside and cotton layers inside. Available in maroon or navy with a silver Fort Street logo. $8 per mask.

Purchase through the online uniform shop 

Orders can be collected from the office.

Students are also welcome to wear other cloth masks if they have comfortable and appropriate ones already. All cloth masks should be washed after use and a fresh mask should be worn to school each day.

Parking