Lucy M. Gowdie, Head of School
21 March 2025
Today marks the final day of our Neurodiversity Celebration Week, and I pay homage to our community who have worked to bring this beautiful week to fruition.
For the workshops, the reflections, the activities, and the celebration, thank you.
In the most powerful moment of our week, our students from Grade 5 to Grade 12 talked to our community about their uniqueness and how this should be, must be, celebrated. From ADHD to Dyslexia, from GAD to Dyscalculia, they explored their journeys in the most powerful and purposeful of ways.
Courage looks like a 12-year-old standing in front of our families, and explaining how his diagnosis does not denote who he is as a human, it does not define him, it adds to the uniqueness of him.
That he is a kind person, a caring person, a fun person, and should be seen for who he is in his entirety, not for his diagnosis.
In my opening remarks I reminded our community that neurodiversity speaks to humanities variety, to the uniqueness of every individual. That just like the garden, the flowers grow at different rates, in different colours, yet they all face towards the sun, all absorb the brilliance of our world in unique and different ways.
We must arrive at the place where as a community we understand and we accept that our children are born without judgement, without prejudice, and how we colour their view of the world, and more importantly of the people within it, is for us to own.
What they learn, who they learn it from, and how they absorb this, is our work. To right the wrong, to dispel the myths, and to build a common humanity on the unique fabric of our community.
Empathy is our work, and we have to put this in a place of priority.
I take this opportunity to extend my sincere gratitude to Elisabetta, Lindsay and Racquel, the mothers who drove the imperative of this week with a conviction born of their sons’ experiences at our school, and their fundamental right to learn and to grow and to be celebrated for who they are.
I express my deep gratitude to Kristin Moffit, Jonathan Mowjoudi and Frank Aarts, for the care and the counsel they provide our neurodiverse students, from Kindergarten through to Grade 12.
And to all those who gathered, who shared in, and who centred their thinking this week, on the magnificent uniqueness of every student in our school, thank you. We should not let this week stand alone as a silo within our school, every day should be a celebration of the diversity of our school, and we will hold fast to this as we step forward, with a renewed commitment to our culture, to our kind of education.
Lucy M. Gowdie
Head of School