150th Anniversary Academic Fair

By David Gray

I would like to congratulate our children on the many (over 150) projects they produced for the Academic Fair.  These were of  wonderfully high quality and I was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm they showed and by their impressive, sustained commitment.  At the Fair I announced the award of a prize for the best science project at the Fair and this will be judged in the coming weeks.  The prize, which will be awarded every year, is the gift of Helen and Roy Blair, Quakers who live in Northern Ireland, whose daughter Lesley Parker was a dedicated Chemistry teacher who died suddenly in 2021.  The Blairs wanted to perpetuate her memory in a way that would honour her love of teaching, of young people and of Science.  The Blairs will come over to Lebanon and make the first award of the prize at the Graduation Ceremony on June 24^th this year.

Thank you very much to all of you who were in any way involved with the Academic Fair which featured over 150  projects, a rather appropriate number for the school’s 150^th anniversary. I would like to express my thanks to Assaad El Helou for overseeing the Fair, to Heads of Department, subject co-ordinators and subject teachers for organising participation and student displays, and to all of you who attended on Saturday, looked after stands, represented subjects on display, and managed parents and their children. I would also like to thank those who provided the sound systems and took care of technical matters.