There is a saying that has been around St Peters for a long time: Boarders are the heartbeat of the school. It’s a saying that you can feel and, in fact, once you step into any of the boarding houses you know that you are stepping into something unique. Boarding is unlike any classroom or school setting that you’ve witnessed before and the bond between boarders is strong.
Students often refer to Ironbark as the highlight of their St Peters journey. The reason for this, they say, is because you live and breathe the experience. At Ironbark, you can connect in a way that you can’t in the classroom. Boarding is Ironbark on a whole new level!
Boarders are together 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They know each other’s nuisances, they can tell when someone is in a good or bad mood and they know that if someone is sad, it’s their job to pick that person up, because one day they might need the favour returned. Boarders learn to care and nurture others as they too will need to be cared and nurtured for one day. They learn patience, tolerance, resilience, independence and acceptance—they always have each other’s back.
Boarding students are a complete unit. They are a team; a family and, when together, they can achieve great things. One of the benefits of living in boarding is that you can easily excel academically. With staff and tutors on site, there’s always help at hand and mini tutorials just happen in the dorms, because boarding students want their brothers and sisters to do the best that they can do.
Over the years, there are so many ways in which boarders have bonded—over a sad movie, a trip to Movie World or even just a bowl of ice-cream eaten with the last utensil left in the drawer (which just so happens to be a fork!). Boarders have drunk milk out of a soup bowl, they have shared more laughs than the stars in the sky, they have traded and borrowed each other’s clothing and they have laughed until they’ve cried. Countless hours have been spent in reception talking about nothing in particular and none of it ever gets old!
When you’re a boarder you share more than most would expect. From meal times to birthdays and even a some of the major life ‘firsts’. In boarding, some students have learnt to ride a bike for the first time, some have seen the ocean of the first time and some have sat through their first ever musical production. As the end of Year 12 comes around, boarders also revel in sharing the ‘lasts’. In November, boarding hearts are filled with sadness as they farewell their senior brothers and sisters. Still, never long does the sadness get them down for, in January they celebrate the arrival of their new family members.
Boarding cements lifetime friendships. No matter how far St Peters boarding students travel or how far they roam, they will always remember boarding as their home away from home. To find out more about boarding at St Peters, click here.