Our College’s Foundations
If you drive past our new Toolern Vale campus on Coburns Road, you’ll see lots and lots of activity. It is starting to get exciting out there. The concrete footings for the Gym are already in place and the vertical steel posts are going in.
These concrete footings are massive. I saw the holes that were dug, they were … HUGE. The amount of steel reinforcement and concrete that went in there to hold the Gym walls up was incredible. The steel reo was shaped into large cubes which were lowered into the deep holes. Then truckload after truckload of concrete was poured in over them.
This week the steel uprights are being affixed to those footings. After that, the upright slab-walls will be fastened to the steel posts. These slab-walls will be like enormous thick sheets of concrete. They’re being made out in some paddock somewhere near Bendigo, already formed with the door and window gaps inbuilt and then trucked down to our campus. Pretty soon our Gym is really going to start looking like a building.
All the while this is happening, other underground and roadway works are going on. Cleverly engineered ways to ensure that stormwater runs away. Cutting and levelling is happening, with layering and packing so that our onsite roadways can bear the weight of a bus. And again, it is remarkable how deep the layers are underneath a properly formed road.
And more and more and more foundational works are making sure that the place we plan to house some of our beautiful Prep and Year One students next year will be safe, secure and suitable.
We are a school, so when we think about the depth of building foundations, we can’t help but see a metaphor for our children’s learning. And the questions jump out at us; What are the foundations of our learners’ learning, and what indeed are the foundations of our school?
Well, the good news is our school is based on deep, deep foundations. Our school is based on foundations that stabilise everything we do. Our foundations are plenty deep and plenty strong enough to keep us steady even through unsteady times. Because our school is built on the foundations of the teachings of Jesus. And in fact, that’s why we are a school that is so great to belong to.
The teachings of Jesus are both simple and deep. His teachings are simple enough for the simplest thinker to understand, and yet remarkably deep, deeper than any footings we could imagine.
A summary of Jesus teachings would be these: He says we are to love God, and to love all other people. We are even told to love our enemies. We are to forgive others when they wrong us, and we are to ask God to forgive us ourselves because no matter how good we might think we are, we also do wrong to others, so asking God to help us to be sorry for our wrongdoing is absolutely fundamental. And repeatedly, Jesus tells us never to be hypocritical, He requires us to be genuine.
Parents and staff let’s commit ourselves to following these teachings of Jesus. They are not only the foundation of our school, but they are also the foundation for a great life.
David Gleeson, Principal