Built By Grit

As I write this article for Dalat News, I am in Hong Kong with the varsity girls’ basketball team at the ACSC tournament. You can be proud of how the girls and boys basketball teams are representing Dalat (the boys are in Taiwan). The opportunity to be a part of this conference, and participate in these regional tournaments, has been both rewarding and challenging at the same time. It is exciting to see the improvement in our sports programs in one year since joining the conference.

In my Dalat News articles so far this semester, we have been focusing on the important quality of grit and how to develop it in our children. As I thought about the topic this week, I realized that Dalat School itself is in a situation in which grit will play an important part of improving our school. The situation I’m referring to is the development and improvement of our campus. The definition of grit is the ability to pursue a long-term goal even through obstacles, challenges, and frustration, staying focused and determined to complete the goal. By that definition, it will take a lot of grit on the part of Dalat and its community to achieve the desired changes and goals for our campus improvement.

Many of you are aware that we are getting close to starting construction on some of our planned buildings. What many are not aware of, however, is that we have been working on this for over three years. There have been hundreds of meetings and thousands of hours spent to get to this point in the process. Each week our goals and plans face challenges and obstacles, and it has been a difficult road so far. Even now, as we are on the cusp of actually building, we face new challenges each and every week.

Our hope and plan at this point is three new major buildings at Dalat in the coming three years. The first is a new two-story media center and library, which will be located where our current counseling, special services, and adjoining classrooms are now (the building next to the Student Center). We hope to demolish the old building this coming June and then complete it by January 2016 for the start of second semester. The second and third buildings will be started after that and will include a new four-story residence life dormitory by the gym and a three-story fine arts/cafeteria building, both of which will be built on lower campus. The two buildings on lower campus will take about 18 months to complete.

We will send out more information about the buildings with information regarding plans for construction while continuing to provide a safe environment and maintain a high quality of education. Please be in prayer for Dalat as these planned improvements are definitely going to take grit on the part of us as a school and as a community.

Have a great weekend,

Karl Steinkamp
Head of School