Toongabbie Christian College

ADRIAN ELMER Student 1982-1989 Teacher 2002-Present Parent 2002-Present

On the first day of February in 1982, my little sister, Rosita, and I entered the grounds of Toongabbie Baptist Church on Metella Rd and had our first lessons at TBCCS. Since that day, there has never been a day where an Elmer wasn’t either a student, a teacher or a parent at the School. I started as a student in Year 4, then did my HSC in 1989 as part of the school’s first ever HSC cohort (all 17 of us!). After my youngest sister, Raquel, finished up as a student, my wife, Rebecca, got herself a job at the school. Then in 2002, I returned as a teacher. Both Rebecca and I have been here ever since as teachers and both our children have now done their entire schooling here (Æowyn, our youngest, is doing her HSC in 2021). To say that the College has been a significant part of our lives is something of an understatement, not the least because of the fact that Rebecca and I met and became best friends while students here. It was exciting, as a student, to be doing things completely differently to how kids in other schools did them. I learnt years later that it was a conscious decision on the part of the pioneers of Christian Community Schools in Australia and not just a stop-gap measure, but as a kid I loved the outsourcing of the local community for the things other schools only had school-sized versions of. Our school library was the best, because it was Blacktown Library, where we went once a week and wandered through thousands, rather than hundreds, of books, records, tapes and magazines, all of which I borrowed avidly. Our sports facilities were the best, because they were Blacktown Ice-Skating Rink, or Wentworthville Swimming Pool, or Toongabbie Squash Centre, places where a sport loving kid could really try lots of things properly, rather than just a patch of half-dried grass behind the school buildings. Our Primary School Food Tech premises were the best, because they were Blacktown City Council’s education catering kitchen, where I got my first taste of my love of cooking. There is a long-standing misconception that Christian schools are a bubble, hiding students from the ‘real world’. To the contrary, we were out in the real world nearly every day. Obviously, the economics of scale, and WHS rules, have changed education significantly in the last 40 years. I hope that as teachers now, we are still actively creating a place where our students are not ‘protected’ from our world, but are actively taught the tools with which they can engage that world to make a real difference in it and to point our world towards what it is truly searching for. When I completed my HSC back in 1989, my reference from the Principal, Rev Peter Hester, stated that I was “firm in (my) faith and demonstrated a clear, though considered, application of Christian principles in (my) day-to-day living”. That little two word phrase, ‘though considered’, in the middle meant a great deal to me at the time and as I look back, I think it has been what has driven me in my entire career as a teacher. I don’t want to be a Christian because of the traditions, because of the history, because of the familiarity or because it’s just what I was told when I was a kid. I want to be a Christian because I have considered it, poked at it from every angle, tested it and found for myself that it stands on its own feet as the clear principle on which to base my life. I want that for my daughters. And I want that for my students. Whether they knew it consciously at the time or not, my teachers at TBCCS enabled and helped me to do that for myself. I hope that in return, I have been able to poke and prod the beliefs of my own students.

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