From the Principal
Happy International Nurses Day for Monday to all the nurses in our community, including Mrs Lauren Green, Mrs Brooke Jordan, Mrs Suzie Creswick, Mrs Kathleen Chilton, Mrs Katie Titley, and Mrs Kirsten Smith in our Health Care Centre team. Our fabulous Registered Nurses are always available to care for our Pymble family: scooting around campus in their buggy to patch up skinned knees and falls in the playground; tending to sports injuries on the sidelines; triaging coughs, colds, injuries, wounds, nausea, asthma, anxiety, anaphylaxis, aches and pains; administering prescription medicines to students; escorting Boarders to offsite medical appointments; and looking after unwell Boarders who require care during the school day.
In Term 1 alone, our nurses saw 1745 students and this support also extends to visitors to our campus. Members of the team recently attended to a student from a visiting school who fractured her arm in a soccer tournament, and last year a contractor working on site was the extremely fortunate recipient of a lifesaving EpiPen injection delivered by Lauren. True story!
We are blessed to have this wonderful team of carers who always deliver the right dose of warmth and professionalism to help our community thrive. Our new Wellbeing Centre in the Grey House Precinct will be enormously appreciated by both our students and our dedicated Health Care Centre team when it opens in 2026.
It’s also that time of year when we celebrate the unique qualities and contributions of our residents of Avonmoore, Marden, Goodlet and Lang House.
Boarders’ Week in May is an opportunity to focus on forging deep connections with our students who live, work and play on campus 24/7 during school terms and, for our Year 12 Boarders, some of the holiday breaks, too.
Each year, our Boarders get a huge kick out of hosting a week of events, including the hilariously friendly/fiercely-contested Day Girls Vs Boarders sports matches and a breakfast to say thank you to staff.
While Boarders’ Week activities are highly visible on campus, the all-year-round contributions our Boarders make to our community are not always so evident. So, in honour of our 146 unique, caring and spirited girls in pink jerseys, here are 10 lesser-known reasons why we celebrate our Boarders, not just this week, but every day of the year.
10 (more) reasons why we love our Boarders
10. Their influence extends across the campus. Many of our Senior Boarders care for our Junior School girls who attend our Out of School Hours Care centre, and some stay on as Junior Educators when they graduate from Pymble and go on to tertiary study.
9. ‘Boarders Get Baking’ is a long-established Friday afternoon tradition. In Term 1 this year, under the new banner of ‘Boarders Get Giving’, our resident ‘givers’ used this time to cook meals to donate to the homeless shelter in Hornsby.
8. Living on campus means our Boarders often show up to watch their peers performing and competing at co-curricular events held at Pymble. How lucky our girls are to have a ready-made cheer squad!
7. The Gordon-Pymble Uniting Church parishioners find great joy in their enduring friendship with our Boarders, who attend the Sunday Service twice a year and share morning tea and beautiful chats.
6. Our older Boarders are true Big Sisters to the younger ones, taking them under their wings to help them settle in. Year 10 Big Sisters are buddied up with Year 7 Little Sisters so they can enjoy after-school outings to the shops and other ‘sisterly’ activities.
5. Our First Nations Scholars in Boarding attend Learning on Country programs with our students in Years 5 and 6 to experience traditional Aboriginal games and activities, local culture and sacred sites in Goodooga, Brewarrina and Sydney.
4. Many of our Boarders are members of the Country Women’s Association to connect with and support women in rural, remote and regional areas.
3. Our Boarders are generous hosts of a range of events in their Boarding Houses, including after-school Trick or Treating with OSHC students, Day Girl sleepovers, and afternoon tea with staff.
2. Pymble Boarders are described as “rockstars”, loved and admired widely for their unique personalities, talents and gifts. Unlike some rockstars, however, they are also the most humble, resilient and down-to-earth people who just ‘get on with it’ and ‘get on with each other’.
1. Their lives back home are as diverse as you could imagine and a far cry from many of ours. By generously sharing their stories, which include working on the farm during holidays, urban living in Hong Kong and waking up to “Uluru in my backyard”, our Boarders remind us that we have much to gain from listening to each other with open hearts and minds, and respect.
Thank you to all who support our Boarders
Having been a Boarder from the age of 10, I have a unique understanding of the challenges and the benefits of Boarding. Our Boarding community fills me with great pride; our girls, our staff and their remarkable families, led by our inspiring and influential alumna, Mrs Edwina Beveridge, are the heart and soul of Pymble.
We also have a small army of parents of day students who rally around our Boarders, taking them to sport and any number of other events, and welcoming them as guests in their homes. I know our Boarding parents would want me to acknowledge and thank these generous members of our community who open their hearts and homes to their daughters.
