Deputy Principal Mission and Pastoral Care
May is Mental Health Month: How are we promoting healthy students physically, emotionally and online
Many members of our community will have seen Ms Skerman’s recently published article ‘Wellbeing Matters’ and after reading this should have a very clear idea about the comprehensive and ‘wrap around care’ approach we take for the wellbeing of our students at Santa Sabina. Mental Health Awareness Month is an opportunity for us to celebrate wellbeing at the College and to consider some of our practices and to ensure that these are best practice in their structures and applications.
Student Leaders have been instrumental in ensuring that Mental Health Awareness Month remains front and centre during May and beyond. Wellbeing Wednesday activities are happening weekly in Homeroom across Years 5-12 and have included wellbeing discussions, creation of self-love walls, relaxation strategies and physical fun. The House Sporting Competition that took place for Year 7-12 students on Tuesday 9 May was also another strategy employed by our student leaders. On Our P-4 campus the rollout of the Friendology Program has also been a fantastic element to see in practice during May. This program is a friendship curriculum that inspires kids to feel empowered, develop a strong sense of self, and love themselves while learning to manage the most important thing to them…their friendships.
This lead up to May has also seen us as a College consider the efficacy of our digital safety and citizenship programs across the College. We have a comprehensive scope and sequenced digital curriculum in place for all students from Prep to Year 12. Resources from the eSafety commissioner website have been very useful in informing a number of elements of this curriculum. For this reason, we have put together a working party of relevant and skilled staff to undertake a review of our digital use and safety curriculum using the eSafety commissioner’s best practice framework for online safety education as our guiding tool. This work will involve looking at the five components of the framework and asking of ourselves:
- What do we already do to address this component?
- What gaps exist and how can we address these?
- What students and staff practices will help to reinforce this component within our digital culture? How can these be encouraged and supported?
We will work on the review for the remainder of 2023 and provide a comprehensive report on this process for the community to consider at the conclusion of this process. We look forward to finding ways to celebrate what we do well and to find ways that we can become a best practice school in all areas of digital safety and citizenship.
Melanie van der Meer
Deputy Principal Mission and Pastoral Care