SSIS Opens a new Administrator Position & Search

Dear Faculty –

This week we will make an announcement to parents regarding the University Guidance Office (UGO). We always like to give our faculty advanced word, though, so that you are in the know as parents and students start to talk.

Part of our commitments emanating from last year’s three-year strategic plan was to raise the profile and the investment of SSIS in the college and university application process. Kris and Erin, and those who came before them like Tom Goetz, have built a great University Guidance Office here at SSIS. We host upwards to 300 schools a year and our students file hundreds and hundreds of applications each year to great schools around the world. While the applications remain predominant skewed towards North America in general, and the United States in particular, the emerging trend is a truly world-wide list of colleges and universities.

The SSIS Board has authorised the creation of a new Level II Admin position as Director of University Guidance. We have engaged Mr. Terry Giffen, who some of you may recall from his visit to SSIS last Spring, to serve as our consultant in this search. The plan is to narrow a list of candidates by mid- to late-fall of this year, inviting our top finalists to visit our campus shortly thereafter. The new position will begin with the 2016-2017 academic year.

The new Director of University Guidance will supervise a second counselor and the office administrative assistant (so the size of the office will not change). Additional changes will include even greater investments in outreach and networking for the Director and the second counsellor, again to increase our visibility and that of our students to universities and colleges. The vision over the next few years is that the Director and second counsellor will both focus more and more exclusively on university guidance and we will eventually look, sometime down the road, to creating a position to focus on health and wellness services, similar to that of Jacob Humes in the Elementary School.

If some of you are not familiar with our admin structure, we have both Level I and Level II admins who serve with me on the Senior Administrative Team. Level I admins include: the Associate Head of School (Wai Mun), the three divisional principals (Dan, Molly, and Jacob), and the Curriculum Director (Tina). The Director of University Guidance (yet to be named) will join the Director of Admissions and Marketing (Katie), the Director of Activities and Athletics (Shelley), the Director of ICT (David) and the Elementary School Assistant Principal (Barbara). The team meets once a week on Monday afternoons.

I’ll share more information with you as the search progresses.

Mark