At a glance: Upcoming Parent Reps Election / FIS at the International School Fair
Dear FIS Community,
I trust your students enjoyed their second full week of school and are finding their pace into the year. I am certainly starting to find mine, with days shared between welcoming students in the morning, visiting classrooms, engaging in conversations with faculty and staff, more formal meetings on specific projects and areas of leadership at the school, interviewing candidates for vacant positions, writing communications such as this one, preparing formal engagements in the form of virtual coffees with parents that started yesterday, partnering with the Board on our strategic direction, and much more. I find tremendous joy in the diverse aspects of my role and in discovering such a diverse and engaged community of learners at all levels.
One way to get engaged in the community is to become a parent representative and to partner with the school leadership to strengthen our vision and help us better serve our students. Parent representative is an elected role. We will be holding elections mid-October. Please look for an upcoming description of the role, an invitation to an information session with me, and specifics about the election process. As a new Head of School, I need a strong group of representatives to help me understand the parent perspective, and I look forward to an exciting partnership.
Of note last week was FIS’s participation in the International Schools Fair organised by the South China Morning Post. Our International Stream Primary School Principal, Ross Armitage, spoke on a panel about the strategies to help students grow and learn in times of disruption. I attended a breakfast with a large number of International Schools’ Heads, a great opportunity for me to better understand the landscape of international education in Hong Kong. In addition, our Principals and Admissions Team held a stand to introduce the benefits of an FIS education to prospective parents from all backgrounds. FIS exhibited a clear distinctive feature: among more than 40 schools represented, we were the only ones to anchor our mission in a language and a culture distinct from the sole English/Chinese paradigm. This seemed to attract a large number of interested parents, looking for a way to differentiate their child’s education from others’.
I wish you all a wonderful weekend and look forward to another week of discovering the school, its students, its faculty, and its community.
