ISB Alumni Coordinator: A year in review

A note from the ISB Alumni Coordinator

The 2018-2019 school year was a special one for this writer, as it ended one chapter of my career as a high school math teacher, coach and athletic director, and began another as the ISB Alumni Coordinator.  As you might imagine this change was met with a fair amount of trepidation, but in the end, it has been a year of new beginnings and much, much joy.

Reconnecting with ISB Alumni around the world

Perhaps the best part of the new job has been reconnecting with nearly 35 years of former students. Utilizing social media (Facebook, for the most part), I have been able to create FB groups for all of the graduating classes from 1983 to 2018, this in order to establish better lines of communication between ISB alumni and the school.  Along the way the number of ‘friends’ of our ISB Alum account has nearly doubled from a bit over 2500 to nearly 5000.  Naturally this fact alone has put me in touch with scores of ISB friends, and have “conversations” from half-way around the world with many, many ISB students.

The best way to reconnect, however, is face-to-face, and this school year has allowed me to personally visit with ISB alumni at local social and sporting events such as the Intra-School Social and the Intra-School Sports Day that both took place first semester as well as the Career Day that took place early second semester; the 2008 10-year reunion that took place in December; numerous ISB campus visits that took place on a regular basis; and small, informal reunions in Bangkok when former ISB students have visited Thailand.  These personal visits were priceless and helped to sustain me over the course of my first school-year since 1975 without direct student contact.

ISB Alumni Give Back

The most uplifting moment of 2018-19, however, came in early second semester when ISB graduate Patty DeMartini Williams (1984) and I presented over 200 clean birthing kits to the Thai Ministry of Public Health.  These kits are instrumental in ensuring safe, sanitary births in situations where people are unable to get to a hospital, and were lovingly put together by ISB graduates of the 1980s during last summer’s most recent ISB Alumni Network Reunion. This inspirational act has motivated me to make the clean birthing kit project an ISB-wide community service activity, not only for alumni, but for current ISB students, faculty, staff and community members.

The goals for the 2019-20 school year are to continue to expand our connection to ISB Alumni online, to increase the number of face-to-face meetings with locally based ISB alumni through more on-campus and Bangkok social/sporting events, ISB campus visits, and locally-based mini-reunions, and as mentioned above, establish the clean birthing kit project as a viable ISB community service activity. We also want to continue to assist as much as possible with larger scale local class reunions and increase interest in participation in the ISB Alumni Network, especially for ISB alumni from the 1980s onward.

2018-2019 has been a very special year for yours truly, and I very much look forward to continuing to connect with our alumni family well into the future!