School Manager's Message
Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue4 1–31 May 2020
Australia is in a far better position combating this deadly virus than the rest of the world. There are only two active cases in ACT at this time and the strict social distancing rules are being relaxed. This is welcome news to many of us. If there is no resurgence (as in Singapore), I believe the government will keep on relaxing the rules.
Some parts of RSAA operations in AITC and SSO will start soon. Although Australia weathered this storm better than most, there are still over 2 million people infected with the disease in the world. More than 200,000 lives have been lost to date.
Some of our ANU staff and students have fallen through the cracks and are facing financial and mental health issues. I would ask everyone to support each other as much as possible, as this long ordeal has taken a toll on all of us in some way, shape or form.
The Federal government has not yet provided any substantial financial support to the tertiary education sector. In some cases, comments from the government have hurt the industry as a whole. RSAA (including AITC and SSO) had a moderately strong balance sheet at the end of 2019. This allowed us to deploy resources where necessary to cushion the financial blow. I would like to thank Anna Moore and Chris Lidman for their strong leadership in ensuring that staff were able to work from home effectively at both the AITC and SSO. I would also like to thank all academic staff, who continued to teach in semester 1 switching from face-to-face delivery to fully online delivery within a few days. This ensured that our worst case scenario financial modelling was not realised.
I would also take this opportunity to thank my admin team. This was the first time many of us have worked from home. This year has been hard on us, working through the fire season and now the pandemic. The services that we provide to the school have continued without any major issues in this rollercoaster of a year.
We set up functional email addresses last year. These functional emails made a big difference and I would like to thank everyone for using them. Please keep on emailing these functional emails to ensure that your requests are dealt by the right staff.
1. RSAA - Enquiries rsaa.enquiries@anu.edu.au : Any enquiry related to RSAA administration can be sent to this email address. Please note if the enquiry is confidential in nature, please email the School Manager (me) or the School Director (Matthew Colless) directly.
2. RSAA - Student Admin rsaa.sa@anu.edu.au : Please email all student administration related queries to this email address. Any financial/other difficulties the students are facing can be communicated to this email address.
3. RSAA Facilities and WHS issues (not HR issues) : You can email handyman@mso.anu.edu.au or rsaa.facilitiesWHS@anu.edu.au to notify us of any problems with facilities & WHS as per usual.
4. RSAA - Accounts rsaa.accounts@anu.edu.au : Please send all your financial queries to this email address.
5. Outreach and Tours – Please email outreach@mso.anu.edu.au for all enquires related to outreach. Please note that many outreach activities have been moved online. 6.HR related matters , you should email "CHM & COS, Human Resources" <hr.science@anu.edu.au> for advice.
Please note that all requests for funding and confidential matters should be emailed to the School Manager (me) or Matthew Colless (Director) only - you should not email any functional emails for this purpose.
Best wishes, Rafat
