Standard+7.3.1

=Develop and implement communication strategies that foster positive school-community relationships. =

Being inspired by the initiative of [|Earth Hour] , I organized a school activity, as described in KRB News It was to be an essentially social evening to take advantage of the spectacular views that our school has and I brought out telescopes to make it a bit of an astronomy night as well. It was at that time that I realized that there was the structure for an Environment Committee and that was the beginning of my relationship with it.

I originally made contact with the Education Officer at Woollahra Council [[|Email trail Woollahra EEO]] as I am the staff liason for the students’ Environment Committee and I wanted to find out whether there were Environment Committees at other schools. I had wanted to facilitate a co-operative relationship with other schools. I was then told that there is a network of schools interested in environmental issues and thus I started attending meetings of the [| ESSSN]. [Eastern Suburbs Sustainable Schools Network]

I prepared a document “[|Possible Directions for Environment Committee]” as a result of various communications with The Woollahra Environment Officer.

A number of my year 11 Biology students became involved with the school’s environment committee and after telling them about the ESSSN the two conveners of the committee came with me to an ESSSN meeting. These girls expressed an interest in forming a network of students involved in their own environmental issues and this network did form.

In order to foster this interest, when it came time to study ‘A Local Ecosystem’ as a part of the Preliminary Biology Course we decided to study a rock platform in Rose Bay, very close to our school. As a link between the Biology class and the Environmental Committee the students are in the process of setting up a Wiki [|How Healthy is Queens Beach?] based on their Biology excursion.

At this stage the Wiki is available on iSchool (the school’s intranet) but students are working on it and hope to open it on the internet in the near future. This Wiki can then be used by other schools in the area to carry out further research and add to the data and information, so that it can become a community resource as well as an authentic biological study.

In this way I believe that these communication strategies have and will foster positive school-community relationships.

My current project is organizing a large scale Science Festival to take place at KRB during Science Week 2012. [|Email trail re SciFest] including [|National Science Week 2012 Proposal]

Its aim is to showcase the work of KRB students to the school and the broader community. Other schools in the area will be invited; both other high schools and our feeder primary schools as well as the wider community.

I am hoping that KRB will be seen by both the educational and local communities as a centre for innovative science learning.