By Douglas K. Prescott, Head of School—CISS Shenyang and AKD Academic Superintendent.

Dear parents/guardians,

Greetings from CISS and Happy New Year! 

It is a pleasure for me to send you my sincere best wishes for the New Year–2021. My wish for each of you is a year filled with much happiness, great health, much hope and prosperity with every positive endeavor.

I want to extend sincere thanks to all our parents/guardians for your support during the first five months of our current school year. Your cooperation, support and understanding allowed us to open and enjoy a very positive and productive first term. Our dedicated staff ensured that all required safety policies and procedures were carried out each day to ensure for a high level of safety for our students, staff and school community. This has worked very well and we will continue to do all we can to safeguard the health of all our students, staff and school community. Working together we can proudly proclaim, that “Together is Better”.  

While the past year has proved to be challenging for all of us, albeit, in different ways, we have individually and collectively shown our resilience and remained positive in the midst of this pandemic. As a school community we have embraced the required health practices and shown a high level of social responsibility through our many caring initiatives that has allowed our school programs to continue and flourish. 

Our student numbers are significantly up this year and we are proud of the reputation that we have developed as an IB World School.  We care about our students and their progress; we know our students, their strengths and areas for growth; we have our students deeply engaged in their learning; we provide meaningful activities outside the regular class hours that appeal to student interests; we celebrate our student successes; we are proud to support community events that showcase our students and staff.

We take much pride in publishing weekly updates to inform our school community, the city of Shenyang and Liaoning province about our students, staff, school programs and school community. We are very extremely proud to say—”CISS Come Grow With US!” 

With a New Year, comes new “HOPE”. Hope for an effective vaccine that can prevent COVID-19; hope for a more peaceful and safer world; hope for continued good health; hope for happiness and continued success for students, staff and our school community; hope for our students to continue to develop their knowledge and skills to become involved and responsible global citizens who have as one of their goals, to make our world a better place through one positive endeavor at a time; hope that our IB World School continues to flourish as we welcome new students and staff in 2021; and hope that for each of us, that in 2021, we continue forward with our journey towards becoming the best version of ourself possible. 

In closing, please accept my best wishes that this New Year will find you blessed with an abundance of faith, hope, love, strength and resilience in 2021! I am looking forward in this New Year for 2021, with much anticipation and hope to experience and see firsthand the continued growth of our students, staff and school community as CISS.