Dear Parents,
Welcome to the 2025-2026 school year!
I hope that you enjoyed a happy and peaceful summer. I look forward to seeing all of you for the first day of school on Monday, September 1, at 8:30am.
I’d like to extend a special welcome to the new families who join us this year. Our team looks forward to seeing you on the New Family Orientation day on Thursday, August 28th at 1pm.
The new school year will be shaped by two overarching themes which were developed with the community of teachers. Annual themes give expression to our enduring values in a fresh, engaging, and whole school approach.
- Fall theme – Fellowship: Inquiry and Belonging
Rooted in the RSHM mission of “that all may have life,” this theme fosters dialogue around inclusion, empathy, and our role as engaged and international global citizens. This theme aligns well with the spirit of innovation while encouraging curiosity across all disciplines.
- Spring theme – Building a Legacy: Stewardship & the Common Good
This theme builds on the Sustainability theme last year and combines care for the environment with ethical decision-making, discernment around the ethics of AI, digital citizenship, and moral clarity. It offers a wide lens to engage students in discussions on how their actions impact the world around them. It instills a sense of spiritual responsibility, resilience and leadership in students to leave a positive mark on the community.
Future Facing Learning
For many of you, I expect that your first visit to Marymount helped you understand who we truly are. Every corner of the school exemplifies an element of a Marymount education. Just beyond the doors of the Coeur de Marie building – literally the home that served as inspiration to the Madeleine children’s book – you find our newly renovated digital laboratory, and that is, I think, a fitting metaphor for Marymount. By combining classical elements with innovative advances and techniques, we strive to embody Mother Butler’s vision for the manifold benefits of a holistic education.
Thanks to a very generous gift from the Joel Dean Foundation, our continuous development of future faced learning in the FabLab has found a natural extension with a host of digital production resources that have been procured over the summer. We believe that it is incumbent on international schools to provide multiple avenues of expression (visual, audio, written, artistic, etc.) for our wide variety of learners. The new tools at their disposal will facilitate project-based learning and avenues to innovatively express their learning through green screen, video broadcasts, podcasts, etc., and we look forward to enjoying their work.
CIS/MSA Re-accreditation
The milestones of the previous years that are encapsulated in the 24-25 Annual Report and Year in Review, attached, position us well for the upcoming re-accreditation with the Council of International Schools and Middle States Association. While our school has been internationally accredited for over 28 years, it is important to note that our last re-accreditation resulted in the highest distinction received by our school with all 87 standards of excellence being met or exceeded.
This external mark of quality has served to highlight our many strengths and has helped us identify key areas of growth. This period of intentional reflection in the life of a historical institution like ours is instrumental to harness our strengths and to continue the tradition of innovation that is one of the hallmarks of a Marymount education.
Global Network of RSHM Schools Strategic Plan
This innovative spirit was on full display over the summer months. In early July, the Heads of the Global Network of RSHM Schools gathered for a conference at Marymount International School, London to collaborate on the very first strategic plan for the Network. As a member of the Coordinating Committee for the Global Network, a group composed of five Heads, it was very meaningful to gather as a community of faith at a key inflection point in the changing global context to discuss important issues, discern, pray, and recommit ourselves to the charism of Père Gailhac.
In an era characterized by profound social, technological, and ecological transformation, strategic planning in educational networks serves as a dynamic articulation of institutional identity, mission-aligned intentionality, and adaptive foresight. The Network Strategic Plan works in concert with the Marymount Paris Strategic Plan campus vision plan (both attached) – published last year in a consultative process that collected your valuable contributions to help us craft a roadmap.
A Multi-lingual Enriched Environment
This embrace of the new that is the driving spirit of our strategic plan is wholly aligned with our school’s guiding principles and calls to mind a primary tenet of Marymount and the RSHM Congregation “to respond to the needs of the time” in a manner reflective of our international Catholic learning community.
Over the summer, there have been two additional initiatives that were developed to further our multi-lingual school environment:
- The dual-language enrichment program for French speaking students, which has now successfully entered its fourth year, is continuing to expand. Grade 4 will pilot a dual-language unit of learning in the Fall semester and will join students from Grade 5 – 8 in the enriched dual-language approach to expanding their written and oral French.
- Young learners are particularly receptive to language learning and acquiring an ease with multiple languages in their pre-literacy years. With strategic recruitment and clear guidelines, we are pleased to announce that there is a fully bilingual French-English speaking team at every grade level in the Early Learners program to complement the existing French program. Through a carefully structured and spiralling play-based curriculum delivered fully in English, early learners develop their fluency in English steadily becoming proficient in reading, writing, and speaking. French lessons, which are daily from Early Learners 2, and the current addition of bilingual teacher assistants to our Early Years’ classrooms, offers each child the chance to build on existing bilingual or multilingual and multicultural capabilities.
As we herald in a new school year, I invite you to join me and my talented team on this annual learning journey that is full of promise, optimism, and an abiding commitment to the future generations in our care. As you enjoy the last days of summer, enjoy the selection of reading and summer activities found on the Summer page of the Marymount Paris website.
The important back to school dates, opportunities to build community, the new after-school activities selection and more are found in our 2025-2026 Reopening Plan, attached here.
Best wishes,
Sarah Thomas, M.Ed.
Head of School