by Dennis Harter
dennish@isb.ac.th
This past Wednesday evening, we hosted a parent information session for parents of grade 7 and 8 students in the coming 2017-18 school year. The purpose of the session was to share our excitement over our new Outdoor Education learning program for all MS students, as well as provide important safety and logistical information to parents. More information will of course be provided as we near the end of this semester and at the start of the new year. Elliott Bowyer, the Director of our “Wild Panthers” program described the program and safety measures in detail and shared our excitement for the student learning and experiences that we are putting in place.
One of the important questions that surfaced was around the current Class Trips program. These trips have been in February and included the full grade at once. Part of the implementation of this new Outdoor Education program is a reallocation of financial resources to support the new program. As a result, the grade level class trips will not run next year. This is disappointing, of course, as the Class Trips provided some bonding and other opportunities that are not the same in smaller groups (while other aspects of the smaller group Outdoor Ed program will be much better in other respects). This is not ultimately desirable, but a reality of responsible budgeting.
All of the information from the Parent presentation are linked below. We also video recorded the session, which we’ve linked below.
All Outdoor Education Resources
Note that the slides from the presentation are in Keynote software format, or there is a PDF version that can be viewed.