Dear Parents and Guardians,
Welcome back to DBS! There has been a wonderful atmosphere on campus this week as your children returned to school. It has been a busy first week with first day induction, the start of lessons and a few house activities.
This year, we have launched a new single home that brings all of our communications together called Parent Connect. If you are reading this, you are on it. We have decided to launch our newsletter here to help promote this as the single place to go for all school information. We have developed this in house and if you have any suggestions on how we might develop and improve it further, you can email headmasteroffice@dbsbangkok.ac.th and we will try to implement any suggestion that are possible. By posting the newsletter here, which is posted as separate bulletin announcements, you can filter by the year groups and school that are relevant to you. Over time, we might add more messages here if parents find that this is effective.
We started the week with challenging traffic. On the first 2 days we suffered an IT system failure which greatly impacted this, but on Tuesday, our manual system led to improvements. We made changes to our on foot pick up to ease the congestion at the turnstile which was a significant safety risk. The challenges that we face are not simply down to an increase in the number of cars, it is because we are trying to implement a much safer and controlled system for getting children into cars. To do this, we must have only a single line at the pick up point so that children do not walk in front of cars. Next week when all ASAs have started we will see more improvement. If it is not functioning at an acceptable level then we have a range of further short term and longer term measures that we may implement and some may require some physical changes to areas of the campus. Some may also not be popular, at least initially as they involve us being much firmer in enforcing our rules. I should point out that last Tuesday, we were in a situation where 5 minutes of severe congestion was caused by 2 families who decided to abandon their cars in an area which blocked the traffic flow, resulting in a poor experience for everyone. We have a collective responsibility to ensure that everyone follows the rules and shows consideration. We ask that all parents cooperate with our guards on request.
Have a nice weekend!
Jonny Liddell
Headmaster