Page 4 - 2020-2021 Annual Report

Message From Our Head of School
This year was a remarkable one for the school.
We have been educating the expatriate children of Shenzhen for more than thirty years, and we are still adapting and being reinvented by this amazing city. This year, of course, we had the added consideration of the Covid-19 pandemic which is still ravaging much of the world. Thankfully, the worst effects of the disease were kept from our community. We had much to be thankful for throughout the 2020/2021 academic year.
We began the year with many of our community still scattered across the world. Slowly, we were able to bring our teachers and our families back together on site and continue our focus on recovery. This word was the key to many of our actions through the year. We gave extra time to making sure the wellness of our students was front and center in all our planning. This affected the way that we delivered our program, assessed our students and provided activities beyond the curriculum. Making sure that the school was a safe place for learning helped our students to continue to pursue achievement in a challenging and uncertain time for many other communities.
We were not able to offer all of the normal SIS experiences due to limitations on international and interschool meetings. Our parent education workshops were severely limited, and some of the field trips and other activities that we love so much were adjusted. But through all this, we adjusted and adapted and innovated so that the year was filled with experiences that gave our students a year of SIS education that compares with that provided in a normal year. That feeling of normality has been among our proudest achievements.
The year was also special for finding our new home for the secondary program at Net Valley. We were unable to move in due in large part to the effects of the pandemic on the building program, but we have an exciting new chapter to look forward to in the coming year. And that is how I hope that 2020/2021 will be remembered. Not as a year that we merely managed life in uncertain times, but as a year in which we recovered and looked to the future with confidence and optimism.
I invite you to look back on the year in our Annual Report. Thank you for your support,
Greg Smith Head of School
2020-21 Annual Report 2