COMMUNITY UPDATE
DIRECTOR’S UPDATE Dear Community Members, At ISB, we live up to our mission that our students are included, challenged, and successful, by making sure that every day brings exciting opportunities for our students to excel at what they found to be their calling. Looking back to the last half of this school year, it is great to see these values implemented across a range of inclusive initiatives and fun and ambitious challenges. In the last few months, we focused on further developing our STEM programme and on ensuring that all our students have access to meaningful STEM experiences as part of their curriculum. Some of our students have really challenged themselves, and have had remarkable success. In February, our ISB MS and ES teams won first place in their respective categories at Destination Imagination, by solving open-ended STEM challenges and presenting their creative and innovative solutions to a live panel of appraisers. Furthermore, our ES and HS Robotics teams reached the finals of the Belgium National Robotics Competition, which on their first-ever tournament is all the more impressive! More recently, during a Hand-a-Thon Workshop that took place on 30 April, our Middle School Science Club 3D printed and assembled 15 prosthetic hands for a children’s hospital in Paris. Nurturing interest and ambition in the field of STEM through such initiatives shows how personalised education opens doors for students to build skills and dispositions that are central to our mission. Another great example of us combining inclusion and challenge is through our Athletics programme. On 8 May, I had the great pleasure to join all of our students, faculty, coaches, and staff at our Upper Field, to celebrate our Special O’s Team, ahead of the National Summer Games hosted in La Louvière over the last weekend. We all wore red to show our Raiders pride and to cheer on our Special Olympians, who represented ISB in the Softball Throw, the 1500m Unified Race, the 50m Race, the 400m Race, and the Standing Long Jump events. Thank you to everyone in our community for helping us create a learning environment that is both challenging and inclusive, as we know that our students are benefiting greatly from your contributions!
James MacDonald ISB Director