Your Grace,
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Over a period of months at the end of 2010 and beginning of 2011 a delegation of concerned Yass community members put much time and effort into dialoguing with your predecessor, Archbishop Mark Coleridge, seeking assistance to rebuild morale at Mt Carmel and trust between Mt Carmel School and the Archdiocese in the wake of the regrettable handling by the CEO of the resignation of Naish Storman as principal.
Apart from specific requests made about the clearing of Naish's good name and naming of the school sports complex in his honour, we made two specific requests regarding the Catholic Education Office's relations with Mt Carmel School. They were:
* That support be given by the CEO to help Mt Carmel rebuild morale and increase community confidence in our school.
* That effective stakeholder engagement policies be introduced to ensure that in matters of importance to the school community, the CEO facilitate genuine consultation with stakeholders including the board and parents.
The Catholic Education Commission's recommendations to close Mt Carmel High School has come without either of these requests being respected. The board and staff of Mt Carmel request, as a matter of justice, that genuine stakeholder engagement take place and that we have until the end of 2015 to turn around enrolments at Mt Carmel.
For the past three years the school board and staff have been focused on rebuilding morale within the school by making it a genuinely Christian and educationally excellent environment. We have done this well. Our high school NAPLAN results have outstripped CEO schools in Canberra (see below) and the school is now happy and stable. At the end of last year we began to focus our attention on marketing Mt Carmel High School to the ever-growing population of the Yass Valley.
I met with the CEO director on November 12 last year and discussed at length nothing but ideas for increasing enrolment in the Mt Carmel High School. No mention was made of the CEC's 'two-year watching brief' which is now being referred to in CEC communications as though it were common knowledge. This is absolutely not the case. Yesterday was the first I had heard of the watching brief. We were not made aware that our school was under immanent threat of closure.
As the chair of Mt Carmel Board, and as the parent of four teenagers whose faith, values, and talents have blossomed in the genuinely Christian and educationally excellent environment of Mt Carmel high school, I would ask you to consider a more long-sighted view of what Mt Carmel High School represents for the future mission of the Church and flourishing of the broader community in the Yass Valley.
The population of the Yass Valley is growing. The staff of Mt Carmel High School are of exceptional calibre and are thoroughly committed to our local community. We need assistance and resources to get the message out to the growing population of the Yass Valley that an exceptional Christian education can be had locally, without parents spending a fortune on fees, without children spending three hours a day on a bus and without young people becoming prematurely dislocated from their families.
We want our teenagers educated in our own community and in a school that supports the deeply-held values of our Catholic community. We would like genuine support from the Archdiocese to ensure that can happen. Negative decisions arrived at in the total absence of genuine stakeholder consultation are not what we need or deserve.
Sincerely,
Lara Kirk,
Board Chair,
Mt Carmel School.