Dear Parents,
Whether things are going well or not, our foundational beliefs matter.
Uplifting and maintaining HOPE is profoundly important at SCBC. We teach it to your children; inside and outside the walls of the classroom. Hope is faith in the unseen. It’s constructive confidence in a future event. Hope enables us to have a positive VISION for the future.
As a school community, we are increasingly experiencing a very encouraging season of time. We are a people of undiminished, constant hope, and positive expectation. I’d argue it is in our DNA. This taught (and caught) expectation forms what educators call a message of the ‘hidden curriculum’. At SCBC, it is not ‘hidden’. Hope is a direct outcome of our personal, and collective belief in a loving, unchanging God.
Our Christian faith causes us to be instinctively optimistic.
During the last fortnight, we became aware that; two of our students were placed 1st and 3rd in an international maths competition, our primary football team won the interschool competition, and a SCBC staff member (Mrs Catherine Jones), has been awarded WA Childcare Director of the Year. We started the year with Rockingham City Council actively supporting new building approvals, including the commencement of a 4.2M STEM building. I’ve heard it said we are being blessed. It’s easy to be positively expectant when things are going well. However, being hopeful matters, especially when things are going wrong. This was the conclusion Dr Victor Frankl arrived at after he reflected on his time as a survivor of the Holocaust.
A reflection of ‘hope’ by a Holocaust survivor.
He wrote a book called; ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’. At the time of his death in 1997, over 10 million copies had been sold of his book, in 24 different languages. Through his professional eyes as a Psychiatrist, he wanted to help establish meaning from his time in Auschwitz, and other like camps. Many history writers have helped us try to comprehend the degrading, dehumanisation and death suffered by prisoners during the Holocaust. During his internment, Victor and his fellow prisoners experienced extreme hardship and potentially hopeless despair. He observed: When prisoners lost hope, death soon followed.
Dr Frankl was a man of faith. At the heart of his book, he observes it is not so much what we expect of life, but what life expects of us. What matters is how we respond to our circumstances. Hope gifts a person with responsibility for how he/she will respond, regardless of what comes our way; the good, the bad, and the horrible.
Your children are in an environment where we work hard, and enjoy having fun, especially when savouring a ‘win’. Our hope is not built upon our cleverness and related successes. Success can be typically a cultural, positive expectation. In this sense, success can become self-perpetuating. That acknowledged, successes are typically seasonal. For example, it is foreseeable SCBC will increasingly become the leading WA school in football (soccer), for at least the next 20 years. Similarly, it’s also foreseeable our student’s individual academic achievements, and resultant ATAR scores, will further continue on an upward trajectory.
Hope from a Christian faith perspective.
‘For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons,[a]neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, 39 neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord’ (Romans 8:38-39, New International Version).
Whether our students are enjoyably riding an upward trend of achievement related success, or experiencing the compromising impact of factors beyond their control, we will continue to teach them that God’s love is unchanging. His love can be our continuous inspiration of optimal hope. Focussing on God’s hope empowers us to constructively respond to our circumstances with positive expectation.
At SCBC, we are instinctively optimistic.
Des Mitchell
Principal