Principal’s Message

Dear Parents, Staff, Students and Friends of WIS,

This week, we were very proud to learn of a number of incredible student successes.

Naomi Tang in Year 10 won the HK Budding Poets competition, and came first out of 2,000 entrants. Her poem will be published in our year book and is based on HK cultural diversity.

Xaviera Artaza won a Human Rights Press Award for her Harbour Times story on the plight of non-Chinese speaking students struggling with the Hong Kong education system. An extraordinary accomplishment for a student who is in secondary school as other winners in the past have all been at university.

I am very proud of both of these exceptional young women’s hard work to achieve such a high level of academic success in two chosen areas.

We also enjoyed celebrating our own Dynasty diversity through Qing and Song day today with students enjoying some fun events at lunchtime.

This week, we welcomed our new Year 7 cohort for August 2016 with two-day transition programmes. We are proud of the way students are welcomed to WIS with a smorgasbord of experiences across the school including academic subjects and some fun games. Ms Gilbert, who will Head Year 7 next year, clearly enjoyed meeting all of the new students who will be our graduating class of 2023!

Finally, of course, I must mention the difficulty we faced with Tuesday. As you know the Red Rain warning and subsequent announcements from EDB came just as we were welcoming students to school in the morning.

The EDB, while saying, “classes are suspended” do expect schools to stay open and cater for arriving students in Red Rain warning if they have already left for school in the morning; if the warning come before they leave for school they should remain at home. We had a large number of students arriving into school, so we were able to provide lessons for those who were here as staff had already come in.

I am hopeful that the EDB and the observatory will post messages earlier in the future as they normally have done over my previous 30 years in ESF which will enable us to respond in a more timely manner.

Yours,
Jane