The start of the year is a good time to emphasize the importance of school attendance. Like many schools, ISB MS highly values the face to face learning time that students have in the classrooms when they are in school. While students get limited assignments and tasks for home learning (aka homework), “doing the work” isn’t really where the learning happens. Learning takes place via the interactions within classrooms, through the instruction from teachers, and by the questions and answers that take place daily. When students are away from school it impacts their learning.
Of course, we understand that sometimes students are unwell, in which case, it is certainly most important that they focus on rest and recovery. We ask that students who don’t feel well stay at home both for their own recovery and to prevent the spread of illness that will impact others’ learning as well.
Because we know that students may miss school when unwell, it is all the more important that students don’t compound the impact on learning by missing significant amounts of days for other reasons. We ask that parents use the ISB calendar to plan trips or appointments to minimize the amount of time their child misses learning at school. We understand that some events arise that are very important for families and these may be inevitable absences. We hope that these can also be managed, because we see the impact extended absences have on students’ learning. We appreciate the efforts of parents to keep their children at school as much as possible.
When your MS-aged child is unable to attend school, needs to arrive late, or depart campus early, please contact Khun Aor (walairaw@isb.ac.th) in the Middle School office. You can call Khun Aor also at 02 963 5800 ext 4404. When a student is marked absent and we have not heard from parents, Khun Aor will typically call home to confirm the child’s absence. We do this for safety reasons to ensure that the child was not on their way to school, but never arrived.
Our attendance policy, found in the MS Handbook (seen below), reflects this in how we determine “excused” and “unexcused” absences. In all cases, we assess student work, but the distinction in reasons for absences is important to note.
