Overview

Shattuck-St. Mary’s Forest City International School welcomed our first students in the fall of 2018. The school is located in Forest City, which is South East Asia’s first ecologically green city located on the southern tip of Peninsular Malaysia, with Singapore visible across the Straits of Johor. All the academic, residential and commercial properties in Forest City are adorned with vertical greeneries, sky gardens and rooftop garden systems that form a natural barrier against heat, reduce energy consumption, naturally purify air, conserve rainwater, and reduce noise. It feels like living in a forest with greenery everywhere.

Our students come from both near and far, as citizens of Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Canada, the UK, and the USA. We offer an American curriculum based on the longstanding tradition of academic rigor and innovation that has been established in Shattuck-St. Mary’s School in Minnesota over the past 160 years. Shattuck-St. Mary’s Forest City International School offers students a unique opportunity to enjoy an American education in Malaysia as either day or boarding students. Our purpose-built academic campus and residential building create a vibrant educational community where teachers and students live and learn together.

Our teaching faculty brings a wealth of experience and expertise in the American curriculum. Over half of our international teachers are Americans. We also have teachers from Canada, the Philippines, the UK, Australia, Germany, Singapore, and Malaysia. The experience and training our teachers bring to their craft create a truly international learning experience for our students.

Studying at an international school is one of the first steps in becoming a full participant in a global society. Students who live and learn in diverse communities as children have a unique opportunity to develop interpersonal and social skills that enable them to not only be successful in their own culture but also to move freely between the many cultures in the world. International schools cultivate opportunities for their students to develop the skills and dispositions to achieve a sense of global citizenship. By examining the world from multiple perspectives and accepting that there can be more than one “right way” to solve a problem, international school students begin to understand that people from different cultures may think differently, but through cooperation, understanding, and open mindedness, people from different cultures who may not share the same values can work together. Students who can master these skills in their school days will become tomorrow’s innovators and leaders.

Developing a lifelong love of learning is essential to ensuring that our graduates will be successful not only in school but also in their university studies and their professional careers. A knowledge-based curriculum that is taught via teacher-centered lectures and memorized by rote is usually a joyless educational experience and rarely helps students to much more than obtaining a top score on the next test. The love of learning comes only to those students who learn the skills to create their own understanding by learning to ask questions, by developing trust with classmates and teachers, and by having the chance to test their knowledge on an ongoing basis through projects and presentations rather than a single test on a given day. The love of learning becomes the key that unlocks a student’s passion for inquiry, exploration, and innovation. These are the skills that will ensure a student is not only well prepared for a single test, but also prepared for life.

Please take a close look at the opportunities that await at Shattuck-St. Mary’s Forest City International School. Explore this website to learn more about our faculty, curriculum, boarding program and everything we are doing here.

Gregg Maloberti, Ed.D.
Head of School
Shattuck-St. Mary’s-Forest City International School