We send you our best wishes from Switzerland, where we are socially distancing ourselves during the country-wide lock-down. We are enjoying the warming weather and are still permitted to go on walks and do grocery shopping. Mostly we are just happy to be healthy and together.

 

Our children, Marc-Frederic Ott, Christoph Ott, and Stefanie Ott, along with our outstanding faculty and staff, have been leading the charge and keeping you up to date on the state of the school. The school feels empty without the laughter of the students in our hallways. We miss our LAS students, who are generously sharing their lives with us from afar.

 

In these difficult times, the LAS mission remains important: Developing innovative, compassionate, and responsible citizens of the world. Our students will need to be innovative, tackling new problems during this pandemic. They will need to be compassionate, taking an example from those who put others first. Our students will need to be responsible, taking the best path when faced with a fork in the road. Finally, we must maintain the dream of building bridges between nations, cultures, and religions. Thus, the experience of our wonderful mix of students from the four corners of the world continues to give us a vision worth living for.

 

The world—and LAS—will be different after the Coronavirus. Perhaps fast living and taking creature comforts for granted will be replaced by the ideals of humanity: taking care of each other, protecting the environment, and respecting those different from ourselves.

 

During this time, we will need to learn to interact in a virtual world. While, for a time, class instruction will be taking place online, we will continue to foster our Faculty Family relationships, encourage cross-cultural interactions, and provide opportunities to develop strong values. We believe that when our students return to the Magic Mountain, the lessons learned in today’s virtual school will immensely strengthen the realization of the LAS mission.

 

We sincerely thank all members of the LAS family in supporting this goal. We know the school will be following up with you soon, but in the meantime, we are thinking of you and hoping that you and your family are safe.

 

We look forward to the times when we will meet again and share the dreams of a better world built by our LAS children.

 

Best wishes,

 

Doris & Steven Ott

LAS’s Grandparents