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We were thrilled to welcome back our loyal group of Road Scholars to Spitler School. Road Scholars have been visiting the SSF campuses since 2008, but the pandemic severely restricted travel to Cambodia for over 2 ½ years.

The people who travel with Road Scholar are not tourists, they are travelers. So, it is no surprise that they were one of the first groups to travel back to Cambodia to visit our schools. They are curious to learn, respectful of cultures, and they are passionate about travel. Road Scholar tours are “educational travel” focused, and while they visit our schools we share stories of our schools’ history, the impacts of our teachers, and we welcome the Road Scholars’ insightful questions. As with most visitors to our school, we like to schedule visits around recess so not to interrupt classes, but also so visitors can experience the energy and playfulness of our students. And we also cannot thank them enough for the school supplies they are so generous to give to our schools.

Many of our most loyal supporters have been Road Scholar visitors, whose short time on our campus inspired them share our story and become a part of the Spitler School family.

Many of you who have followed our schools over the past decade know of the annual rainy season, and the difficulties it brings to rural communities and our schools. The water takes its toll on our campuses, which requires us to undertake regular infrastructure maintenance. Over the years we have shared stories and photos of our donors helping support our students and schools with road construction, drainage pipelines, and sandbags. During one extremely high flood year, families could not even leave their homes to reach food markets. We then coordinated the delivery of hundreds of pounds of rice to our students and their families.

While we would always prefer to apply our dollars directly into the classrooms, occasionally we simply must address the issue of a lot of water coming in a short period of time. Luckily, Spitler School and Kurata School are situated on higher elevation, so that we can manage the situation with truckloads of fill dirt every few years. Stephen Mazujian Middle School, however, sits in a lower area and is more prone to flooding. This year, we committed to a drainage project which we believe will be a longer-term solution to protect the middle school buildings, and to help protect our students and staff from diseases arising from standing water.

We are grateful to our donors who continue to support all aspects of providing a quality education for the children attending Spitler School, Kurata School, and Stephen Mazujian Middle School.

We are pleased to welcome Mr. Ros Bunthoeun to our Spitler School Foundation, Cambodia staff. He comes to the Spitler School Foundation with ten years of experience in education with a MA in TESOL (Teaching English to Students of Other Languages), and he was most recently working with orphan children in Phenom Penh.  In addition to teaching classes himself, Bunthoeum now oversees the English program at both the middle school and high school and handles administrative duties at all our schools. He also brings experience in areas such as sports, health education, and music.  Bunthoeum’s wife is also in education, and they have two children. Please join us in welcoming him to the team.