Dear Friends,
As you are aware we have just hosted an IB MYP authorization team visit and the Directors and I met with them for their debrief session this afternoon.
The team will write a report and send it to the IB head office. A committee will meet to discuss our application and make a recommendation to the Director General in February. We will receive our report and decision on authorization shortly after (late February)
The report will contain ‘commendations’ for things we are doing well, ‘recommendations’ for areas we ought to look at and ‘Items to be addressed’ for the areas we must deal with in a given time frame.
Although strictly unofficial, it is fair to say that the team was highly impressed with our school, our mission, the quality of education and the support of the entire school community. They were especially praising (amazed was the word they used!) of how hard the faculty had worked and how much they had achieved in working towards the MYP in such a short time.
They also went out of their way to praise the support of the board and the parents for the school, international education and the IB in particular
The verbal report we received contained a couple of “items to be addressed” a few ‘recommendations’ and many ‘commendations’ (far more commendations than anything else)
And no surprises!
All in all we received very positive feedback.
There are still many things we need to do to make Riverstone the beacon International School in the west, and that is our goal, but this is a big step and one that lets us know we are moving in the right direction
We host the IB PYP authorization team in spring and hope to be the first and only school west of the Mississippi to be authorized for all three IB programs.
To put this in to perspective, there are currently 925 schools in the USA officially authorized to offer the IB
Of these, only 93 have been authorized to offer both MYP and DP
Only 6 in the entire USA have been authorized to offer PYP, MYP and DP
There are only 12 schools in the west that are authorized for MYP and DP
There are no schools in the west who have managed to achieve authorization for all three programs, PYP, MYP and DP
Andrew Derry
I think therefore IB
