End of the school year

Dear teachers, pupils, kindergarteners, nursery children and parents,

Thank you for this year together! A year, which started off brilliantly – with a successful „Green School” for most of our pupils. We had six „cooltural meetings”. Our guests included the author of the world famous „The Book Thief”, Markus Zusak, and also Wojciech Hermeliński, the former Constitutional Tribune judge and Head of the State Electoral Committee. We took part in the Abu Dhabi IB conference. There was a language trip to Valencia, along with many debating competitions which were part of the Warsaw Debating League, and also history debates. In November, in collaboration with the city of Warsaw, we organized a conference on „A school of values”, in which our pupils, parents and teachers made up part of the speakers. Older pupils prepared a Science Festival and Thanksgiving Day for the younger classes. We enjoyed splendid celebrations of Independence Day, together with a presentation of our school’s cultural diversity. As part of our charity projects we organized concerts, musicals, theatrical performances, art auctions and a Christmas Fair. In January we had a particularly successful school prom.

Then came our winter holidays and a whole new turn of events. We suddenly had to switch to working in a completely different reality. Every single member of our school community had to summon up their courage, stamina and creativity to find the very best solutions – how to switch to working in a completely new and unpredictable situation. All of our teachers and administrative staff got through this trial by fire, this test of our professional honesty and diligence.

I think we can be proud of ourselves! We did it!

Parents’ support of our pupils has been vitally important, particularly in the case of our kindergarteners and Years 0-4. Parents, without your help and effort e-learning would not have been possible at all. Thank you as well to all of those parents who were fully supportive of our teachers and myself right from the start of the situation in March, when our school’s normal activities were suspended. This has been hugely important to me, particularly during that traumatic time at the beginning.

We not only managed to transfer our teaching online – our lessons, syllabus materials, exams, classwork, the PYP final exhibition, teachers’ meetings, parents’ meetings and so on.  But we also managed something more – we brought at least a small part of our school spirit online as well. This unique spirit appeared in our school Open Day for candidates to our High School, Primary School and Kindergarten; in our written High School entrance exams; our online „Green Schools”, our PSE lessons, psychological counselling, the film festival, our extensive two-week project on the Roaring Twenties and Thirties, drama rehearsals and our play „Ziemiańska”, the highly unusual PE lessons which even included sports competitions…….

I know that some of you may not be completely convinced by this „online school spirit”. Well here are some concrete figures for you. The average end of year grade in our Primary School was 4.68, and in our High School it was 4.4. Even more importantly, our pupils’ attendance in all classes was over 90%, which is always important, but particularly in the IB programmes.

Congratulations to our pupils and teachers!

I am sending warm wishes to this year’s IBDP final year students and to our eighth-graders.  Our final year students had their May exam session cancelled, which reduced the pandemic-related stress, but also created greater uncertainty about the unknown criteria around final results. Fingers crossed that your final grades will reflect both your ability and your expectations.

Our eighth-graders faced their exam papers during this epidemic. They showed courage in a difficult situation, combining two sets of procedures at the same time, exam procedures and pandemic procedures.

Now it’s finally time for a holiday! Time for a rest from your screens, laptops, smartphones and all sorts of electronic gadgets.

I hope you all have a chance to submerge yourself in clean, emerald greenery. To feel the wind in your hair, the sea-breeze. To experience unbelievable mountain views.

I wish you a safe holiday-time euphoria (I know that is an oxymoron), a careful joy and a chance to recover from this traumatic pandemic experience.

Let’s keep washing our hands enthusiastically, and keep wearing face-masks in crowded places.

Let’s meet up healthy and happy on 1st September, hopefully back in our school buildings.

Once again, thank you to all of our teachers, pupils and their parents, for their great efforts, which now bring enormous satisfaction, and the excellent results achieved by our children and young people, and in such difficult times!

Hanna Buśkiewicz-Piskorska

Warszawa, 26th June 2020