From the desk of the MS/HS Principal

 

If you were able to attend yesterday's MS/HS Principal's Town Hall: thank you! I hope that you were able to take away something new and interesting about our school. I also hope that you can see that there are numerous examples of success here of all sorts–academic, spiritual, physical, and social-emotional.

We never want to define success here at ICS in a singular way. That might be a challenge if you, like me, were educated in a more traditional setting. A setting where success was measured by a number on an assessment at the end of a chapter. A setting where failure was something that followed you for the rest of the year and impacted your final grade even if that failure took place months ago. For ICS, success and failure go hand in hand on the learning journey. We want our students to learn from every failure and grow. We do not want them to fear failure, but instead see it as a part of a greater process. A process that builds them towards being exemplary young men and women, inside and outside of the classroom. Of course, that being said, we want them to be successful with academics. 

If you attended the Town Hall, you would have seen that we continue to perform highly on our standardized assessments: the AP, PSAT, and MAP assessments. You would also have seen that our graduates are accepted into colleges and universities from all over the world. Hopefully, you would have felt confident that, despite our small size, we are doing big things! And while COVID-19 has had an impact on sports around the world, ICS pushes onward.

We continue to offer practices under the ever-changing guidelines. We do this because we are committed to excellence in our holistic approach to education. Sports play a huge role in this. Not only does it bring value by increasing the physical well-being of our students, but it teaches them important skills such as leadership, teamwork, communication, and perseverance, just to name a few. The same goes for our chapel and Week Without Walls program.

The pandemic is only a hindrance, not a deterrent. Our Serving Team is hard at work making sure that our students are spiritually fed and challenged. Planning is well underway for events such as the MS/HS Service Fair, the MS/HS Spiritual Emphasis Week (SEW), and MS/HS Week Without Walls. This planning is adaptive and accounts for varying degrees of COVID-19 restrictions. This way, we are able to do as much as possible with what we have available to us, in order to do our best in helping develop our students spiritually.

Finally, as many of you know, ICS has been blessed with an influx of some exceptionally qualified educators with a deep pool of international experience this year. One of those is Mrs. HaYoung Jung, our new MS/HS Social Emotional Counsellor. This is a new position at ICS that was created in response to the increasingly important need to address the social and emotional well-being of our youth. 

More and more, we are seeing students express feelings of stress, anxiety, depression, and even thoughts of self-harm and suicide. Our students are children created in the image of God and we want what is best for all of them. We want them to develop and grow into wonderful members of His Kingdom. We cannot do that if we ignore their social and emotional needs. We have already seen how important this role will be for our community, just in the first few weeks back at school this year. Paired alongside our Academic Counselor, Mr. Eric Laug, we truly have a support team that is ready to serve our students, whenever and however needed.  

I pray that this year is one where barriers are broken, bonds are forged, and all levels of success are celebrated!

In Christ,

Darryl Harding
MS/HS Principal