Welcome to Bungendore High School. Bungendore High School is a public, comprehensive, co-educational high school, opening its doors in a temporary site for Year 7 and 8 students in 2023.
It is an absolute privilege to be part of the development of a new school which allows staff and students the opportunity to embrace all aspects of contemporary teaching and learning practices in a purpose-built environment. At Bungendore High School, there is a strong emphasis on continuous student improvement and a focus on all students achieving mastery. We pride ourselves on providing opportunities in all areas of learning for our students to achieve personal success.
It is important that our students thrive in a positive learning environment where we consider the needs of others, treat peers and staff with kindness and consideration, and nurture one another. In order to achieve this, we have created a set of character habits that we will be working to build throughout the students' time at Bungendore High School. These were developed through consultation with students, staff, parents and the wider school community. The habits of character are: Empowerment, Perseverance, Integrity, and Community. These four habits spell the word EPIC and we are proud to embrace the opportunity to grow into this word as a descriptor of our school community.
The wellbeing of our students is paramount. In order to be successful, independent learners, we explicitly teach students how to develop the necessary skills to be adaptive, resilient and understand the importance of self-reflection throughout their learning journey. Our wellbeing program is a school-wide program called We are Crew, which comes from the statement: We are crew, not passengers. The program is designed to encourage all students to be active participants in their learning and wellbeing, developing positive academic growth mindsets and building their resilience. Each student works within a small group with a crew leader. The crews meet every day to experience team building and explicit teaching of social and emotional skills, in addition to learning how to learn. In this way we ensure that every student is known, valued and cared for.
In order to be productive, empathetic members of our connected, global community, we have created a set of Positive Behaviour Expectations which are embedded in the daily lives of our students at Bungendore High School. The positive behaviour expectations are for all students to be: Engaged, Responsible, Compassionate and Respectful. We have elaborated on these words with statements that explain what each of these look like in various environments, and explicitly teach these expectations, as well as utilising them to provide guidance for our everyday behaviour at school.
We have created a Community of Schools with our partner primary schools: Bungendore Public School, Gundaroo Public School and Sutton Public School, entitled the Weereewaa Community of Schools. Together, we are building middle school opportunities and expanding the ways in which our schools support each other to increase opportunities and grow together.
Setting up a school does not happen in isolation. I am very proud to be leading Bungendore High School alongside an extremely talented, inspiring and hard-working staff who are constantly exploring ways to ensure our innovative teaching and learning practices are purposeful and engaging, without losing sight that students are always at the centre of what we do.
Melissa Giddins
Principal
