American School of the Hague

Greetings from a busy and productive High School! There is ample evidence of lots of learning taking place in both classrooms and in the host of co-curricular activities available. One of the best parts of my job is dropping into classrooms for brief visits to observe student learning. I can report a wide range of varied activities, curiosities being stimulated, students exploring new ideas, challenging themselves, being require to think critically and creatively and increasingly taking responsibility for their own learning…all pretty exciting stuff to witness!

The HS office sent out an email last week inviting you to join us here for the upcoming parent-teacher conferences. Allow me to remind you: Thursday, 10 November 5:30-8:30 p.m. and Friday, 11 November 9-12 noon. There is no school for students on Friday. Conferences are by appointment and sign up sheets have been outside the HS office since last week. We look forward to welcoming as many of you as possible. The attendance of your son/daughter is encouraged as we seek to include them in the discussions about their learning.

We are awaiting news from our technology experts as to when our upgraded network will be ready to handle the addition of our grade 11-12 laptop program. As soon as we are confident that our infrastructure can support our additional usage I will be in contact with the parents of our grade 11-12 students with details of the rollout.

A reminder that our end of semester examinations will be taking place between Tuesday, 13 December – Friday, 16 December. The review days will be 7, 8, 9 and 12 December. Please remember our ongoing policy of not granting excused absences for the examination period unless due to real emergencies.

Finally, thanks to those parents and Board members who contributed to our Self Study and the recent Accreditation Visit. The visiting accreditation team and ASH certainly valued your input. The team reported how impressed they were with the learning focus of our students, their motivation and their independence as learners. The team questioned many of our HS students about a wide range of issues and the team informed me that they answered with honesty, articulation, thoughtfulness and pride in their school. We look forward to receiving the team’s report in the New Year.

Enjoy the beautiful Fall colors.