Waad Academy Family,
At Waad Academy, teaching is not treated as a job that starts at the gate and ends when the bell rings. It is treated as a duty, the kind our founder, Dr. Adel AbdulJalil Batterjee, has spent a lifetime describing as the most precious a person can carry. He built this school on the conviction that every student deserves to be met as an individual, whatever their needs, rather than pressed into a single path meant to fit everyone at once, and that the students with the most to give, the gifted among them, deserve a place that knows how to draw it out rather than let it sit unused. That conviction is what turns a staff room into people who show up early, not because a contract says to, but because a child is waiting for them.
It is also why a school counsellor sits close to every section rather than being kept for emergencies, why our youngest children start each day naming how they feel before they open a book, and why older students are guided through conflict instead of simply disciplined out of it. When outside reviewers walked this campus earlier this year, with none of us in the room, they came back with the same word again and again, offered by students who had not been coached to say it: happy. That is not a small thing to hear from strangers.
That same conviction carried us through two of the most demanding accreditations a school can be measured against, from NEASC and from the Council of British International Schools, both earned in the same year. It is what let a partnership take shape with the King Abdulaziz Foundation around gifted education, and what quietly built us into a College Board center for AP and the SAT and a Cambridge exam and professional development center, able to carry a child the whole way from Early Years to A Levels without ever needing to leave. None of it happened because someone went chasing a certificate. It happened because a group of adults decided, individually, that a child’s education was worth treating like a duty rather than a task.
The campus itself is something to be proud of, from the clubs and competitions to the stage, the pitch, and the trips that take students beyond the school gates. But a campus is not what a child carries out into the world when they leave it. What stays is character, the confidence to speak in a room that once intimidated them, the discipline to fail at something and try again, and the readiness to face a future that will look nothing like the one we grew up in ourselves. That is the harder work, and where most of the year actually goes.
That same instinct is why the work does not stop once a visitor leaves. Ninety two percent of our teachers say they trust the changes made this year enough to keep going with them next year, because those changes came from real coaching in their own classrooms, not a single workshop and a certificate. More than four hundred parents and students, across every grade, were asked directly what is and is not working, and every uncomfortable answer went straight into the plan for the year ahead, with a name and a deadline attached to it, not a shelf. That habit, of asking before assuming, is service too.
Good enough for our own children was never a line meant for a wall or a brochure. It is the standard every one of us returns to on the ordinary days, the ones with no visitors and no ceremony, when the only people watching are the children themselves. It is the promise underneath every accreditation, every survey, and every conversation this school has with a worried parent at pickup, that your child will be treated the way we would want our own treated, not once, but every day they are here. Thank you for placing that trust in us. We do not treat it lightly.
Racha Zohbi
Executive Principal, Waad Academy
