From the Board Chair

Dear SFS Community,

It’s a great pleasure to be writing my first letter as Chair of the Board of Governors. I’ve worn many hats during my time at SFS, from student to alumna to Council member to parent to Board member, and I’m honored to take on this new role in a community I have loved for many decades.

This issue of The Banner focuses on “passion,” and one of SFS’s great passions is service. Our school’s mission statement reads as follows: “Seoul Foreign School, Centered in Christ, inspires a passion for learning, pursues academic and creative excellence and is dedicated to the service of others.”

How can we see this dedication to the service of others in play? I would suggest that we can see it every day in our culture of kindness and consideration, when a child helps a fellow classmate, or a teacher waits for a student to give an answer. But this service mindedness is most prominent in the ways that SFS engages with the local community.

When I was a student at SFS during the days when tigers smoked (as the Korean saying goes), SFS was still the exceptional school that it is today, but there was not much interaction with local communities and its “exceptionality” often meant difference and differentiation from its surroundings. SFS in the 1970s and 1980s was a place where “foreign schools” were exclusive enclaves, with students going up and down the hill in black chauffeured cars and then back to their homes located in exclusive enclaves, with very little student engagement with the communities in between. Those were the times when my taking the public bus home was considered a curiosity.

If our students can gain one passion in life, I would hope that it could be a passion for service. And I believe that SFS truly nurtures this passion. God bless and best wishes for the holidays.

Hyungji Park ‘85 Chair of the Board of Governors