Dear Prospective Teachers,
This year, something we have been planning and imagining for a long time finally became real: BASIS Bilingual School Guangzhou (BBGZ) opened its doors.
As Founding Head of School, I have had the unusual privilege of watching a school take shape from the ground up. For months, I described our work as standing at the foot of a mountain, looking toward where we wanted to go and preparing for the journey. Now our students and teachers are taking those first steps. By the time you might join us, the climb will be underway, but the story of BBGZ will still be in its opening chapters.
And what a remarkable place we have in which to write that story.
Our campus is genuinely magnificent. Its architecture draws inspiration from the kapok flower, an enduring symbol of Guangzhou, and that connection between our school and our city is visible throughout the campus. Inside are extraordinary spaces for learning: a beautiful library, state-of-the-art classrooms and laboratories, an auditorium, and even an observatory that gives our students the opportunity to look far beyond our own campus. Throughout the school, gardens and thoughtfully designed outdoor spaces provide places to explore, gather, reflect, and learn.
But buildings, no matter how impressive, do not create great schools. People do.
That is what excites me most about the years ahead.
BASIS Bilingual School Guangzhou is being built on the experience and academic strength of the BASIS Curriculum Schools network, but we are also creating a community with an identity of its own. Our five PRIDE values (Perseverance, Respect, Integrity, Dependability, and Empathy) help define the kind of community we want to become. We want students to be challenged and supported, teachers to continue growing throughout their careers, and classrooms to be places where curiosity and intellectual ambition are celebrated.
Teachers joining us in our second year will enter at a particularly exciting moment. Our doors will already be open. Our first traditions will have begun. We will have learned important lessons from our founding year. Yet BBGZ will still be young. There will still be traditions waiting to be created, programs waiting to grow, and countless opportunities for new teachers to leave their fingerprints on what this school will eventually become. That matters to me. I do not want BASIS Bilingual School Guangzhou simply to be a school where talented teachers come to work. I want it to be a school they help build.
Someday, the gardens will be familiar places to generations of students. The auditorium will hold years of performances and celebrations. The library shelves will contain pieces of our history. Students will look through the observatory and perhaps discover passions that follow them for the rest of their lives. By then, BASIS Bilingual School Guangzhou will have traditions and stories that feel as though they have always been here.
Right now, however, we are creating them.
If you are an educator who finds that opportunity exciting, if you want to teach in an extraordinary environment while helping a young school grow into the community it is capable of becoming, I hope you will consider joining us for the next stage of the climb.
Go Lions!
Jason E. Shorbe
Founding Head of School
BASIS Bilingual School Guangzhou
Explore career opportunities with BASIS Bilingual School Guangzhou on our careers website.
Sign up for a live webinar on Thursday, October 8th at 6 p.m. PDT/Friday October 9th at 9 a.m. China time about teaching opportunities for the 2027-28 school year with BASIS Bilingual School Guangzhou.
