The Free Press sat down with Kyabram’s high-school leadership cohort to hear from the young future leaders in our region.
The Kyabram P-12 College 2024 college captains are Michael Keegan, Huon McIntosh, Marissa Watts and Angus Scoble.
Marissa Watts
Marissa didn’t apply for captaincy on a whim; it’s been on her mind for a long time.
“Everyone knew about the school captains, but not everyone aspired to be a school captain and growing up, I was one of the students who did,” she said.
“I really liked the fact that you could take leadership and in general just make the school better.”
Her goals for the year are to improve on her skills by immersing herself in the role alongside her fellow captains.
“My goals for improving my skills would be to communicate with others, get student voice, find out what other people feel they need works best for them and align that with what I feel, works best for me and in turn changing the way that certain things run, adding new things in and just overall innovating the school,” she said.
This isn’t her first time in charge, however, as she has been house captain and music captain in previous years.
Outside of school, Marissa can be found at her job, where she works as a beautician, a job she is passionate about.
Angus Scoble
Through his passion for sports, Angus has always enjoyed taking on leadership, which led him to decide to apply for school captain.
“I've always strived to be a leader and I guess school captain just fell into place with it all and I had a few teachers and people tell me that I should go for it so I just gave it a crack,” he said.
While he is a part of the leadership team, he hopes to increase the connection within the school community.
“I think this year I'm really trying to get everyone involved, not only high school but primary school as well and trying to make it a bit more of a community,” Angus said.
Angus is passionate about sports, especially football, and plans to continue playing post-high school.
“I'm really pushing towards, trying to make the AFL or VFL or something like that,” he said.
“I can go for the draft this year or next year as well so I'm really going to try and drive that.”
Michael Keegan
A desire to uphold the school’s community and values is what motivated Michael to apply for school captaincy.
“I got the chance to be school captain in primary school and ever since I've come here, I've had the goal of just being school captain,” Michael said.
“After COVID, I could see that everyone's motivation was down so somehow I want to bring the school back to what it was,” he said.
Uplifting student voice is what motivates Michael and something he will focus on this year.
“I want to have more students to have a say,” he said.
He has big plans for next year, and he is hoping to do a Bachelor of Science at Melbourne University.
“I want to be an astrophysicist,” he said.
Outside of school, Michael is a dedicated member of two sports teams in Stanhope.
“I play D-grade cricket and under 18s footy,“ he said.
Huon McIntosh
When Huon was in primary school, he had a taste of leadership and has wanted to be a college captain ever since.
“I was a school captain in primary school in Lancaster,” he said.
“I’ve always wanted to improve the community in our school because it's dipped a bit and I want to increase community involvement in the student.”
Now that he’s the captain, he hopes to introduce more activities at the school.
“I'd like to get more sort of activities and more things to do at school at lunchtime and recess,” he said.
He has a passion for animals and is hoping to either study veterinary bioscience at university or animal studies at GOTAFE.
Outside of school, he enjoys doing work on his farm, especially training farm dogs to work the sheep.