Our seriously beautiful campus!

Reflecting this, we come to our fourth key Pillar, Campus and Facilities.

Each day as I drive up towards the top of the school, I pass our pristine green oval which our Property Team somehow manage to keep beautiful, come rain, shine or drought. On the other side of the road are the gorgeous gum trees, which are a feature of our campus. I know we have over a hundred ‘trees of significance’ on our property, many centuries old. These trees host a myriad of birds, possums, koalas and the ever-occasional resting ‘bin chicken.’ Behind me as I drive up the driveway, is Purtinga, our home of Sustainability Learning. Here students have a learning forest, a fire circle, award winning wetlands and Environmental Science learning spaces.
As the drama teacher that I am, every time I walk into our fully equipped theatre, I stop and remember how wonderful it is for our students to have access to such great resources. I could talk excessively about our Technology and Science Centres, our Years 7 & 8 centre (Paideia), our Library (Anakalypsi), the Arts building (Atelier) and not forgetting our canteen (cibo bello). Our physical environment and our facilities are simply wonderful.

Mal Wegener, our founding Principal, visited us this week with his lovely wife Kathy, on a gorgeous March afternoon. As we walked around the campus, he told me the stories of the very beginnings of the College and the facilities at the time. He described the initial transportable classrooms, the first patches of grass which would one day become our ovals and green spaces. Mal was so pleased to see how our campus and facilities have grown, as our community has grown.

As we recaptured what it is to be Cornerstone College in our Key Pillars, we reflected on how our campus shapes us, equipped with this knowledge we wrote:

Indeed, we do have great facilities and a simply gorgeous campus, but it is all for nothing if our students do not thrive and grow. All that we see of our beautiful campus, is for our students.
A mentor of mine once said of facilities in schools; “bad teaching + great facilities = expensive bad learning.” It is a simple truth that I’ve seen to be true.
Our focus at Cornerstone College, as we have discussed over the past weeks focusing on our Key Pillars and considered our community, our innovative history, our faith and purpose, is always on supporting the growth of our young people in every area. We are lucky to have great facilities which enhance what we do as educators and parents. We will continue to work to provide great resources for our young people, so that the learning they experience is enhanced by those physical things we see.
We never forget, however, at the heart of a great education is the commitment to learning and the commitment to quality relationships. That we can have both, surrounded and enhanced by our gorgeous campus, is something we should be thankful to our Lord!

Blessings

Tom Brennen, Principal