Guest Speaker Sue Najor
Ken Taylor introduced the guest speaker Sue Najor, who is the Instructional Leader at Ashmont Public School. Sue has been a teacher for 43 years.
Sue has been at Ashmont for six years. Ashmont Public School has been recognized as the top school for academic growth for Indigenous students. Sue said despite what you hear from Parliament house, we are definitely closing the gap.
During Sue’s long teaching career, she has retired several times and does not do that well. When Sue came to Ashmont and at the first P and C meeting, 3 parents turned up. Some of the experiences from his first time at Ashmont were seeing students out at 11:30 at night with out parents, kids using the roof of the school as a running track and general moment to moment behaviour problems.
Sue gave several very warm examples of children improving in literacy and numeracy and how proud they and their parents were. She plays outside games with a link to improving their grammar. They have changed the Parent teacher interview where the child runs the interview and sometimes they have ten people come for one child.
Sue provided charts and graphs that validated all of the test results of the Ashmont success story over the past two years. Attendance at the school is now 90%.
Sue is very proud of being a teacher and has never regretted her decision. Her motto has been to ignore the behaviour and concentrate on the learning. Police play an active role in the school, both as authority and playing ball with the kids. She encouraged visitiation to the school by the club and she talked about going to the Wagga Wagga Rotary Club and getting two volunteers to come read. And she also said that she learned to focus on what the kids are interested , ie, soccer and sport and let them read magazines about the sport. They are learning to read. |
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There were a half a dozen questions from the crowd which reflects the high interest in Sue’s talk. President Paul gave Sue a vote of thanks and a gift of H2O olive oil from the club. |