Amman - School Report Question and Answers
How is the overall communication between teachers and parents, and the administration and parents? How is communication facilitated?
There is a weekly newsletter that is generally helpful. At the high school level, I mostly don't hear from the teachers unless there is a problem and then they will send an email. They do parent - teacher conferences virtually which is great for working parents. We can just schedule them and do it over a couple days. I find their PowerSchool system pretty useless in terms of helping me know how my child is doing, but they do put a lot of emphasis on the kids taking responsibility for signing up and knowing what they need to do so often the parents are out of the loop. - Jul 2022
Confusing and poor, in my opinion. Assignments aren't posted on the websites regularly, and in our experience, teachers having varying comfort levels with the technology used. Kids didn't know where to look for their info and parents were inundated with information that could have been consolidated. There were teachers who responded swiftly and accurately, but overall it was laborious. For example: Extra curricular info was an exhausting experience. You received an email that the newsletter was ready. Then you had to click a link, insert a password, get to a page that didn't really have any info, then you had to look for info that was buried 3-4 pages down and had to know you were looking for it. Then you would finally find it, sign up for the cooking activity, and receive an email thanking you for signing up for band. Then you are confused, go through the same thing, and get another band sign up. So you have to contact someone, ask if you did it wrong, if your kid is signed up for the right thing, they don't answer, you follow up several times, copy a principal, yes they are signed up, auto response is wrong, then you get an email your kid wasn't signed up on time, circle back, etc. You get the picture. It should not take two hours+ and 5 emails to get your kid into an extra curricular class. This kind of thing was constant. - Feb 2021
There is a lot of communication. Sometimes parents feel that it is overkill, but I like that it errs on the side of too much. I sift through what I think is important and leave the rest. - Sep 2019
Communication is really good, but I have noticed that there is a shift of the high school student becoming more and more independent, so, the parents are less involved. And that's OK. I like that! - Nov 2018
We are so pleased with how ICS takes care of everything. I have barely had to do anything concerning "problems" at school. It's the first time in years that I have not had to go to school to raise a concern. - Feb 2018
Quite good, weekly newsletter from the Head of School. Most communication is filtered through the student's advisor, a faculty member that is assigned a group of 6-7 students to watch over. As the kids are older, there is effort to work with the kids before going to the parents. - Apr 2017
From our experience, communication has usually been good or excellent between the teachers and ourselves, with only one exception in our four years at the school.
The communication from the administration, on the other hand, requires significant improvement. Our attempts to seek clarification on school policy, discuss issues concerning our children, offer constructive criticism where we saw areas which required improvement were often met with defensiveness and occasionally outright hostility, by both the principal and the superintendent. - Aug 2016
Excellent in our case. - Dec 2015
OK and getting better. It really depends on your teacher. - Sep 2015
A-: Parents get regular emails, and members of the staff are responsive to specific inquiries. - Aug 2015
A. My son's teacher is very responsive via email and she sends out a nice monthly newsletter. - Jan 2015
