Unity Concord International School

Unity Concord International School Chiang Mai (UCIS) was opened in 2017 by Amporn and Chugait Garmolgomut. The Garmolgomuts are award-winning teachers and school administrators with more than 30 years’ experience as educators. The other schools operated by Amporn and Chugait Garmolgomut are Americana Chinese International School (ACIS - August 2019), British Chinese International School (BCIS - August 2021), Little Stars Bilingual School, Ambassador Bilingual Academy (July 2020), Ambassador Bilingual School (ABS), CEC Language School and Finn College.

Unity Concord International School originated in response to the growing need of an increasing population and the requests of parents seeking to enrol their children in an American education system. This need, backed by a school which will provide the opportunity for their children to attend higher-level education at University both in Thailand and abroad, is why Unity Concord International School was established.

Unity’s mission is to provide all students with an exceptional education that will allow them to excel inside and outside the classroom. Unity seeks to achieve this mission by offering students a rigorous core curriculum, an outstanding staff, high standards and expectations, extended instructional hours, and personalized learning opportunities. Unity will strive to ensure that students are prepared for college and for the 21st Century world and workplace by creating students with higher order thinking skills.

Unity seeks to: provide targeted instruction and support services to accelerate growth among students under‐prepared for high school success, and (as a consequence) prepare them for college. The mission of Unity Concord International School is to provide an experience-centered, life-long learner-based environment that enables each student to meet the academic challenges and develop
the social, emotional, and physical understanding necessary to succeed in life.

Educational Philosophy
We believe students learn in an environment that encourages inquiry and dialogue around Common Core State Standards, that values and builds on prior knowledge and that nurtures and supports the whole child. Unity provides an environment where accountability, flexibility, innovation, parental choice, parent teacher involvement, and public-private partnerships can work together to provide a better future for our children. Unity will embrace, celebrate and benefit from the ethnic, linguistic and the socioeconomic diversity of our ever-changing community by promoting family, school, and community partnerships.

The goals of Unity Concord International School are:

• To provide students with practical knowledge and skills that will promote competence, a lifelong curiosity and self-motivation for learning in an ever-changing world.
• To provide students with the necessary tools to maximize their ability to achieve high scores on norm-referenced tests.
• To teach and motivate students to seek understanding of the world around them and to apply this understanding to the broader world contexts of career, family and civic responsibility.
• To help students learn to reason, research, analyze, apply, elucidate and extrapolate for preventive problem-solving and goal setting/attainment.
• To provide a culture that will learn by doing, accompanied by the willingness and the energy.
• To keep asking the questions that will generate the next best alternative.
• To regularly measure student and staff performance and to provide information for attaining higher achievement;
• To regularly measure parent and school community satisfaction; and
• To enable pupils to become self-motivated, competent, and life-long learners.

As an American curriculum school, UCIS teachers and staff have a relatively complex task of aligning syllabi, content, and assessment to continuously evolving and overlapping learning standards. While other International Schools may operate with a set of standards that seem more straightforward, traditional curricula such as the International Baccalaureate or the British National Curriculum can be quite restrictive and come with their own drawbacks of rigidity and increased oversight. At UCIS, we believe the modern American learning standards developed through collaboration between federal and state agencies, along with guidance from industry leaders, subject experts, and teachers from all over the country; offer a strong balance of rigor and flexibility that is reflective of the diverse educational landscape in the US.