FROM THE HEAD OF SCHOOL Welcome to this mid-year edition of CGS Outlook, celebrating the vitality of our School community in the first semester of 2022. Once again, it has been a challenging time for students, staff and families. Although we kept the COVID-19 virus off campus through nearly two years of lockdowns and restrictions, the pandemic wave that swept the country in early 2022 finally broke over the School, bringing sickness and absence at unprecedented levels. At times in Term 2, nearly 20% of staff were away with COVID or winter illnesses, or bearing carers’ duties. Students too were absent in large numbers, with countless families in household quarantine. Classes that couldn’t be covered had to be collapsed or reallocated, students were supervised en masse in the War Memorial Hall or in outdoor programmes, and time and again activities and events were postponed, cancelled or transferred online. While not nearly as dramatic or traumatic as the disruptions of previous years, the impacts of the pandemic this year have been at least as gruelling to an exhausted faculty, a frustrated community and to students who have not known the School in normality for three years. That’s a long time for the young: the whole of the early learning years, and half the junior or the senior school experience. Many have never even known the School that we were before the pandemic, nor therefore what we strive to recreate. Yet, remarkably, amidst it all, were the makings of a magazine like this, brimming with individual and collective triumphs, packed with the ideas and idealism of our student leaders, and vibrant with the life of a School determined not to be diminished. Focused on their chosen themes—belonging, mental health, sustainability and outreach—our school captains have given purpose to the year in rebuilding our sense of community. Their initiatives, including welcome events for new students, Harmony Day, recycling schemes, and an admirable array of service learning projects have worked to rekindle our togetherness.
This year’s Year 12 Shave Against Cancer, involving students and members of the School Leadership Team in solidarity, broke all School records in raising funds for the Sydney Children’s Hospital, where a number of our students have been cared for in recent years. Similarly, student-led events like Pink Day or the Dignity Drive, Crazy Socks for Docs, or the NAIDOC round in Rugby, have all built a renewed sense of community based on inclusion and care. At the same time, as you’ll read in these pages, our sport has been regaining its momentum, and Outdoor Education has begun again at last. The creative and performing arts have been laying foundations for their post-pandemic resurgence, albeit with a number of first semester productions sadly curtailed by last-minute COVID cases amongst the cast and crew. Building on the confidence of last year’s extraordinary IB and HSC results, our academic life is flourishing too, as reflected here in news of science Olympiads, Kids’ Lit Quiz, the Da Vinci Decathlon, and more. Behind it all, of course, has been the enormous task of completing construction of the School’s new library, Music Centre and auditorium. The project has, been beset by COVID delays, disruptions to labour and supply chains, and torrential rain. Yet, led by a phenomenally dedicated and resourceful team, it has risen and taken shape dramatically beside the newly renovated and rededicated Quadrangle; a symbol of what’s next to come for our School. Like all in this edition of CGS Outlook, it is a tribute to the commitment, resilience and aspiration of our community. For that, for all that we enjoy, and for all in our students that makes us proud, may we give thanks. Sincerely, – Justin Garrick, Head of School
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