MESSAGE FROM DIRECTOR

Gainesville International School is an English-speaking school using a modified yet, specifically, American curriculum based on that developed and actualized by Riverside Military Academy, Gainesville, Georgia. GIS’s mission dedicates to developing young people into the leaders of tomorrow. Our rigorous, relevant academic content and standards, underpinned by personal and collective responsibility and accountability are relevant in both military and civilian life. We strive to facilitate access to the skills that create proactive and dynamic leaders, grounded in self-discipline and nurtured through and emboldened by valuesbased, ethical, and moral foundational standards. The ability to communicate and impart those attributes is an elemental quality of a true leader. We recognize our exclusive responsibility to our young people is not to teach mere communicative competency. We strive for global communicative excellence, academically, and interpersonally.

At GIS, we value education as an active rather than a passive phenomenon. Our classes are practical, dynamic, creative, and energized. We emphasize Language Skills in all our classes and focus on preparing our students for their continued academic and later professional lives, as well as their personal and social lives as global citizens. Our English-speaking teaching and learning environment is inhabited by vested, interested, supportive teachers whose sole purpose is to ensure the individual and collective success of their academic charges—your sons and daughters. These self-same teachers seek and utilize every possible English language teaching moment and maximize every potential English language learning opportunity. With a sustained and graduated scaffold approach, our fundamental communicative emphasis remains on the traditional four disciplines as active disciplines. With varying emphases, reading, writing, speaking, and listening, share one specific thing in common, as they do with life—each is an active exercise.

Frequently, overlooked as processes, reading, and listening are no less dynamic than speaking or writing. With our studies skills programs, we instruct and develop
strategies for purposeful academic and personal reading and listening. Often underemphasized, listening with a purpose is an attribute constituent to effective, productive communication and to sound leadership.

English-specific content classes will emphasize sustained vocabulary acquisition, pronunciation abilities, and speaking fluency skills to mirror those of native speakers. Ultimately, our English-speaking students will begin to mirror the dynamic vitality that is native language communication replete with nuance, and the power of utterance. Students will take part in literature and composition. Furthermore, writing and context-specific writing strategies and writing drills will be emphasized in all the academic disciplines GIS offers. As students progress through their academic levels, they will equip with the requisite proficiencies in all areas necessary for TOEFL, SAT, ACT, and IELTS examinations.

Communicative excellence comes from communicative experience, and communicative experience is born of error. Encouraging our students to challenge their comfort zones means encouraging a willingness to err, and teaching our students that mistakes which are the result of solid effort are not only acceptable, they are invaluable learning opportunities in and out of the classroom.

When our students graduate from GIS, they will be solidly prepared to not only function but excel in international universities and military colleges. As graduates of GIS, our students will serve as leaders and reflect the standards of responsible excellence for which we stand.