From the Director

What I am excited about this week…
 
Go Leopards! AISL will be hosting its first tournament of the year on Saturday, starting at 08:00. This will be an U13, U16, and U19 LISL Basketball tournament. This will be a great follow-up to last week’s very successful LISL Volleyball tournament at Baobab. The Lusaka International Schools League (LISL) is a local sports league that our Activities team started to provide more playing opportunities for our scholar-athletes. Please come cheer on the teams.
 
TWO Parent Information Sessions Next Week! We will be holding two parent information sessions next week.

• On Monday, 9 September, please join our counseling team to learn more about our child protection policies and procedures. This is our plan for how we can mitigate the risk of - or respond to - cases of abuse or neglect. This session will begin at 07:30 and will take place in the Secondary School’s room C4.
• On Tuesday, 10 September, our Multilingual Program Coordinator, Ms. Elisa Ingles, will provide an overview of our after-school mother tongue program. This program is based on school and parent partnerships that create opportunities for students to deepen their fluency in their native language. You can learn more later in this newsletter.

 
Explore Zambia! Across the next few weeks all students in Grades 6-8, 10, and half of Grade 9 will venture out on their Explore Zambia trips. These trips allow our students to experience an exciting part of Zambia, bond with their teachers and classmates, and pursue curricular objectives. As you can imagine, these trips bring a very taxing 24/7 supervisory responsibility to teachers. Please be sure to thank them for their commitment to provide these enriching experiences for your children.
 
Emergency Procedures at Work! As you know, AISL takes the safety and security of its students very seriously. I am pleased to report that those procedures served us very well yesterday during the demonstrations in town. Our security manager’s regular contact with security personnel in Lusaka, including the U.S. Embassy’s Regional Security Office and our security contractor, Pre-Secure, meant that we had accurate reports about the demonstrations that were often verified in person at the affected sites.
 
This information allowed us to make timely and informed decisions and then communicate information to the community. Across the day, we sent four email messages and two SMS blasts. If you did not receive these communications, please check in with one of the offices to make sure we have your updated information on file. If you did not see the emails, you may need to check your spam/junk mail folders and adjust your settings.
 
As a result of the information we had about the demonstrations, we cancelled our noon bus departure and held the affected ELC and Kindergarten students on campus, where they had lunch and played a bit more with their friends. Many thanks to the Primary School team and Sunflower Kitchens for happily jumping in to make a plan to support these youngsters on short notice. When our buses did leave, our security company tracked them using our satellite tracking system and had their response vehicles on standby.
 
Please join me in commending our Security Manager, Mike Mills, the leadership team, and the Primary School teachers for responding to this situation calmly and efficiently. Many thanks also to the U.S. Embassy security team and Pre-Secure for their support.