The first day of school is fast approaching for the first group of students who will start school on September 1 after the summer holiday and three exciting weeks of summer camp. The school’s administrative division has been working tirelessly throughout the entire summer to ensure the smooth running of the school operations and prepare for the new academic year.

With technology taking centre stage in the previous months of e-learning, our IT Department has been working around the clock to ensure the best e-learning experience for not only students but teachers and parents as well., A set of new servers and storage have been set up, with network device adjustments taking place to ensure stability in the work environment and the optimum performance of all devices on campus. According to Jenny Zhang, Head of IT, maintenance work is ongoing on all peripheral application systems, like CCTV, PA and UPS, printing etc., the round check takes place three or four times a year.

“What we are doing – maintaining the multi-media devices in Learning Communities and updating the student iPads is what we would do every summer, and despite the special situation this year, we still do this to guarantee a conducive classroom environment for the next school year”  Ms Zhang explained.

The work does not end there for Ms Zhang and her team but they also have to ensure the new cohort of staff is prepared for. “We are in the process of setting up and maintaining email accounts and all other IT environment related functionalities for teachers and students”  she added.

With the summer programme currently online, the IT team has also been on standby online to assist teachers and parents with any technical challenges they may be coming across on platforms such as Teams, Seesaw and Zoom.

Now that the school start dates have been officially announced and students will be back on campus from September 1st, the SMD Department’s main tasks have been to organize and upgrade the physical space students and teachers will be utilizing for the new academic year. Delia Wang, Head of SMD shared with us that renovations included the School’s most popular area, Playground A, where students spend a lot of their time doing PE and playing with friends during break time. In addition, other areas were remodelled while classrooms and other public areas repainted.

Although during renovations, a lot of attention is paid to the School’s physical space, necessary to create the dynamic, organized and engaging learning environment we want to create for students, their health and safety continued to be of utmost importance this summer.  “Before the epidemic ends completely, we will continue to do what we did last semester.”  Ms Wang stated. “Before entering the school, we will ask the staff about their physical health, have their body temperature checked twice, and disinfect their hands and soles at the same time, to ensure that all the teachers and students are healthy, and entering the school with normal body temperature.”  she added.

This COVID-19 epidemic prevention, also included the thorough cleaning and disinfecting of all school buses, Learning Communities, campus facilities and equipment, while also maintaining the supply of epidemic prevention material such as alcohol-based hand sanitizers, N95 masks, temperature measuring tents, signage and cleaning material.

With staff members scheduled to return to China, some in time for the start of the school year, we are looking to forward to having life back to normal again!