By Lillian Leptos
The volunteering team at Reservoir West Primary School, consisted of Rocco and Isabelle. While Isabelle was a loved alumnus, Rocco was new to the school. In the semester of volunteering work with teacher Anne Maree Honeybone, Rocco has earned a reputation as a wonderful young man who has made a significant contribution to the school.
Anne Maree is the head of reading intervention at the school and team leader of the support staff. In addition, she is the school’s literacy leader. With all these responsibilities you can imagine that she has many tasks to get Rocco working on.
“When Rocco comes on Friday afternoon, there are no classes as that’s the time we run the school assemblies,” she explains. “That said, there is lots of work for Rocco to do. He has been a huge help with preparing student work for displays, or for sending home to parents. He has also played a big part in administrative tasks like the filing of reports and checking resourcing materials that are always getting mixed up as classes use them. Rocco is the extra set of hands that schools always need.”
Rocco has dreams of a future career in some kind of engineering or a medical-related field.
The work at Reservoir West Primary may initially seem to have little relationship to these career aspirations, but in fact that’s not the case. Rocco is already showing the diligence and attention to detail that is at the core of both those career directions.
Anne Maree says: “He is not fazed by any task we give him. He has the ‘OK, I’ll give it a go’ attitude. Everyone he has had contact with has commented about what a lovely young man he is. He has the sort of work ethic and quiet personality where he could be really useful in working with students needing support. We would give him some training and feel confident that he would do a good job.
“He would be great in subjects like Inquiry which are less structured and there is always a need for an extra set of hands.”
Rocco has definitely made his mark at Reservoir West Primary. This experience has given him the sort of work and life experiences that have helped to boost his confidence, and which will help him in making decisions about his future.