Head of School Corner

Dear GJS Families,

Welcome to the second edition of our newly updated Kontak, our monthly newsletter dedicated to celebrating teaching and learning as well as highlighting student and faculty achievements, both inside and outside of the classroom.

This past month we hosted our first Mid Semester Conferences (MSC) of the 2019-2020 academic year, an event to which we had tremendous Primary and Secondary student and parent involvement. Engaging in reflective conversations while establishing goals for the next term is an essential activity enabling students to take active roles in their education. Further, as MSC’s were completed, we were greeted by Fall Break, providing all community members with a well deserved, much needed week to rest, recharge and recover after an extremely active first term. Since our return from break, we have been greeted by Year 2 and 3 Assemblies on Communication and Reflection, Secondary Student-directed events for Mental Health Awareness Day, Breast Cancer Awareness Day, and the launching for the Primary School basketball and the Secondary Volleyball seasons. Our Secondary Students have demonstrated their athleticism, competitiveness, creativity and spirit, competitiveness at their Sports Carnivals. Finally, our Grade 6 students departed for their much-anticipated Study Tour which sees them transport their learning to Lombok. Please read through this edition of Kontak to learn more about some of these events.

For the past term, I sought to gather student voice, while at the same time building my understanding, of the thoughts our Year 12 students have about their school. From August through October, 68 individual interviews were held, each student was asked the same nine-questions during a 15-minute dialogue. The results, as a whole, have been quite interesting. While I have yet to debrief with the Year 12 class, an opportunity I look forward to having in the coming weeks, I do feel that sharing the results of these conversations is beneficial. I will be working with the Secondary Admin team to drill down on the raw data to identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities generated through these fruitful conversations. The data has been captured in a pdf file that is available for viewing by clicking here.

At Global Jaya School, we are committed to ensuring the nutritional wellbeing of our community members, faculty, and students alike. For the past two months, I have engaged members of our student body, our faculty, our Parents Association (PA) with our Canteen operator, CAS, in identifying concerns and generating solutions to matters that are impacting our canteens operation. Through a survey tool, we gathered the student and faculty voices on concerns, usage and offered an opportunity to provide suggestions for improvement. We identified price, quality, variety, and taste of food item availability as the major issues. Our next step, in acting on this information, was to invite a school-wide panel of individuals involving Primary and Secondary Student Council reps, Faculty reps, PA Canteen reps along with the Canteen, to develop updated as well as new menu items. Finally, we held a taste testing session during which all committee members provided specific feedback on the new recipe food items that were presented. While this has been a long and engaging process, we hope to see our efforts translated into a new menu will be put into production. Our focus will be on better quality options each day but with fewer choices. The element of choice will come from the variation of items available that are available over the week. Our goal is to continue developing our relationship with CAS, our current canteen partner while proving healthy and nutritional breakfast, snack and lunch choices that appeal to our students.