Today, we started back to school for all teachers. Because of the situation with Covid-19 in Hong Kong, we were forced to begin our school year working from home.

The first meeting of the morning was done over Zoom by our head of school. He’s an American and has been with the school for quite a while. He was always exceptionally kind to my children.

It was a strange way to start the school year. I truly love my job and love the people I work with. It was so nice to see their faces, but it was hard to sit there and see them through a computer screen. There were a lot of new faces surprisingly.

After the whole school meeting, we had a secondary meeting with the principal of the secondary school. This is about half of the faculty and staff of the school, so much smaller. We were able to have a bit more of a dialogue in this meeting. Our new people were able to introduce themselves a little better.

After the secondary meeting concluded, we had our department meeting. Now those are the people I really wanted to see. I miss my people so much. One of the girls on my team lives in the same housing compound, but I only saw her in passing a couple of times.

I did see the head of my department more. She’s been an amazing support to me over the last year or so. And then there is A. I didn’t see her as much as I wanted to, but I did still get to see her.

The last meeting of the day was our year level meetings. We met with our head of year to talk about what advisory and the year level will look like for this year. I love our group of advisors. I am going to miss Bub’s advisor. He was such an incredible guy. He’s moved on to Singapore though.

So previously, they had said no students were allowed into school until 17th August. I don’t think we will be in by then either.

When we were going through this before, we had to have 28 days of no local transmissions before we could have the kids back onto campus. Right now, we are no where near that benchmark.

The other teachers are saying that the government isn’t even considering international schools right now because the local schools don’t go back until beginning of September. They say that we will receive guidance at that point. To my understanding, my company is trying to talk with the governing body, but I don’t think there is any winning in this.

Parents aren’t going to be happy no matter what happens. You have on one hand, if we go back to school too soon and someone (or many someones) end up with Covid, there will be an uproar. On the other hand, parents don’t believe that their fees are necessary since the kids aren’t in the actual school building. It’s a no win situation.

The rumors so far are that we will not be back on campus until after half term break in October at the earliest. There is talk that travel restrictions will be in place over Christmas as well. I am really hoping that isn’t the case. I really want to get home and meet my new nieces.

The positive thing is that we are living in a place the kids seem to be more comfortable in. They seem much happier here. I know that I am.