Director’s message 22

ISO Parents
November 24th, 2020

RE: VIRTUAL LEARNING DRILL #1/Anticipated Traffic Congestion/Potential for School Not Being Accessible: 11/25

After hosting 15 weeks of school, I am happy to report that:

  • Our largest “new” student cohort in years’ has successfully settled into our program
  • The Board of Trustees has been reconstituted
  • Our teachers and parents have worked together to hold successful conferences and to assist our students in their learning process.

It has been a busy, but extremely successful start to our 44th year here at the International School of Ouagadougou.

To that end, as announced at the start of the year, the International School of Ouagadougou adopted Google Classroom, PlusPortals, SeaSaw, Flipgrid and other tools to assist with distance learning. This was put in place in both the event that we had to once again deal with the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020, but also in understanding that traffic congestion, and spontaneous demonstrations may make transport to the school challenging and/or inaccessible during this Presidential Election Year.

We have received information that may occur in the ISO vicinity tomorrow, creating problems in accessing the school campus.

Therefore, we will suspend school and not hold formal classes; we will, however, use this event as an opportunity for students, teachers and parents to “learn how to learn”, using our newly upgraded distance learning protocol. This work was created in early August, preparing for our Middle States Virtual Visit in October.

This virtual school drill is the final piece to our program that, as Director, I feel should be in place as we close out the first half of the school year.

Going forward, school will only be suspended when there is a potential hazard that poses an overall safety concern for operating the school. Both this year, and last year, we invested significant time and resources to establish and enhance our online learning protocols. Tomorrow, The Crisis Management Team and I have determined that we will put our system to use, and students will have a distance learning model for instructional delivery for the day’s scheduled classes.

Now that we have transitioned into the 2020 – 2021 School Year, we will use tomorrow’s event as a drill for our “almost new” system, to ensure both our new and returning students and staff are familiar with the system, and to allow us to help each other identify areas that need to be addressed or clarified.

As a final reminder, teachers will post their online activities by 10:00am.

Our distance learning program can be found on our new ISO website, www.iso.bf.