Start of a new year: Letter to Parents

Dear Parents and members of the Riverstone community,

I sincerely hope you have all had a wonderful, restful and productive summer vacation. All of the staff members are now back in school and are getting ready for an exciting new school year.

Although we have several new staff members and some new positions at school, I would specifically like to welcome our three new faculty members who have joined us from overseas:

Lauren Bastion comes to us from Australia and has a wealth of PYP experience around the world. Lauren will be teaching Grade 1.

Oliver Martin joins us from England and brings with him a great background in Mathematics and outdoor education. Oliver will be teaching Middle School math.

Anke Voigt is a true international teacher having worked in many international schools. She joins us from her previous position as Athletics Director at the United Nations School in Hanoi. Anke will be teaching P.E. in Grades 4 – 10.

We wish them all every happiness and success in the Riverstone community.

Despite the summer vacation, the school has been a hive of activity these past few months. Summer school has been very successful this year with many new camps and a great number of new faces to the school. Ben Brock has plans to make sure that next year will be even better, so make sure you sign up early when new camps are announced in spring 2010.

The Strategic Planning Team has also been hard at work. The plan is now in a draft stage and will be presented to the team on Wednesday, August 26. From there, it will go to the Board of Trustees before being presented to the community for final comment in mid-September.

You may have noticed that the new Elementary building is progressing beautifully. We remain on track for completion in early December. If this date holds, we plan on moving both the Elementary and Middle Schools in to their new homes over the winter break. This will result in a delayed return to school; however, we will be asking our parents and students to come in to the school to help us move into the new facilities.

Various international links and exchanges have been taking shape over the summer and yesterday we ran our final tests on the new video-conferencing facilities. Although we will make sure you get more detailed information in the coming weeks about these new exchanges, I wanted to give parents of students in Grades 8, 9 and 10 plenty of notice since those students will have the possibility of being involved in exchanges to Bogota, Shanghai and Europe in the spring and summer.

Also, over the summer, we received several external benchmarks that confirm Riverstone’s incredibly strong academic program:

ACT summary results detailing the percentage of students ready for College-Level work:

English Comprehension: State: 72% National: 67% Riverstone: 100%

Math: State: 45% National: 42% Riverstone: 100%

Social Science: State: 60% National: 53% Riverstone: 100%

Biology: State: 30% National: 28% Riverstone: 100%

All-round: State: 24% National: 23% Riverstone: 100%

IB Results: This year, Riverstone seniors achieved an 80% pass rate on their IB Diploma exams with an average score of 31.4 points. In addition, 24% of our students were awarded ‘bilingual’ diplomas. All of these scores are well above all international averages.

Newsweek released its annual public school rankings earlier this week. The rankings use an index that basically divides the number of AP or IB courses taken by the students this year by the total number of graduating students. Unfortunately, Riverstone was not permitted to be part of the study as an independent school. However, it is worth noting that Riverstone’s index is 5.97 for 2009, which would place it firmly at 25th place across the entire USA if included in the study.

In addition, we will publish the full list of college acceptances for our graduates in an upcoming newsletter. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate our students on their incredible successes.

As always, all up to date information about the school and particularly student successes, can be found on our website: www.riverstoneschool.org

With the global economy the way it is, I realize that many families have to make difficult financial choices. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for prioritizing high-quality international education for your family. For our part, Riverstone will continue to offer a modern, demanding, yet supportive education that truly prepares students for the realities of the world today and tomorrow. We will make it our priority to get to know and understand all of our students and their families and to strive to help each individual reach their full potential.

In closing, I would like to remind us all that students learn best when there is a supportive and effective partnership among school, family, and the student. To this end, the entire staff and I look forward to working with you and your children to make the 2009-2010 school year a great success.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Derry

Head of School