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Dear Alumni,

It is with great pleasure that I write to inform you about our plans to celebrate South Island School’s 40th Birthday in 2017.

It has been an exciting journey. From our birth as an annex of Island School, to our time in Causeway Bay – which I know is fondly remembered by many of you – to the move to our final home on Nam Fung Road, our alumni share one great connection – you are all a part of the tapestry that is the History of our great School.

One of the most rewarding parts of my six years at SIS has been to meet alumni and to hear their stories. Stories of the past are a wonderful part of our heritage; stories of ‘what happened next’ after alumni graduated from SIS create a rich resource for our current students that can provide not only information but also reassurance. As we all know, life does not travel in straight lines and an insight into that reality can really help young people as they struggle to cope with the pressures of examinations and Higher Education choices.

We want our 40th Birthday to be very special and we want our alumni to be a major part of our celebrations. Our plan is to focus events into the autumn of 2017, between September and December, which will celebrate 40 years since our very first Term in 1977. We will be planning events for students and there will be special units of work written into the curriculum for our young people to learn about our wonderful past. As alumni, it is your world that they will be learning about and we ask you to ‘bring it back’ in 2017 to help us paint as rich a picture as we possibly can. Our intention is to create a commemorative book from the celebrations and we hope that this will include many photos, stories and memories from you.

For alumni, our plan is to choose one weekend during the next school year and to throw our doors open to as many of you as we can possibly attract back. We have a lot of ideas about what we might do but the first thing to do is to choose the weekend. We have been speaking to people for a while and three main choices seem to emerge. The first would be around the end of October 2017: the second, early December before school closes; and the third, the end of March 2018 around the Rugby 7s. If you click https://form.jotform.me/61318074828459 it will take you to a survey form where you can express a preference and answer a number of other questions about the types of activities that you think would be popular. There is also a question asking if you would be able to act as a ‘network point’ for those of you with a wide alumni network. It will be very helpful for our further planning if you could fill out the form by 31 May 2016.

I do hope you can find the time to fill in the form and I really hope that we can tempt you to join in with our alumni birthday weekend. To reassure you, we are not seeing this event as a fund-raiser – our wish is to create a much stronger and more connected alumni network around our current learners…what better vehicle to use for this than to come together to celebrate 40 glorious years?

If the final date that we choose doesn’t suit you and your alumni network, do feel free to contact me and we can look at doing something ‘bespoke’ for your group. Having alumni back in the buildings brings life and laughter to the School – this is and will always be YOUR school…bring it back to us in 2017.

With very best wishes,

Graham Silverthorne

Principal