Dubai: When Nabeel Nasr, a Lebanese teacher, came to the UAE with a big dream and a small pocket little did he know that the school he started out of a three-compound villa in Garhoud in the late 1970s, would expand to include 6,000 students today.
In celebration of Al Mawakeb School’s 35th anniversary, Nasr’s daughter — who was one of the school’s first students and is now the Chief Academic Officer of the school — took a stroll down memory lane, recalling the school’s humble beginnings.
“In the 70s, Dubai was a desert. I was a grade eight student in the school. I remember growing up in the villas that had 123 students, we all knew each other. There was nothing but sand surrounding us, the desert was our playground,” said Alissar Nasr Soubra.
Alissar said the school came into being in October 10, 1979 after her father who came to the UAE during Lebanon’s civil war in 1975, attended a majlis with Khalifa Juma Al Naboudah, Hamad Bin Souqat and Sharaf Al Deen Al Sayed.
The three, joined and supported her father in his dream and are the founding partners and board of directors of Academia Management Solutions International (AMSI), the independent national body running Al Mawakeb Schools, whose CEO is Nasr’s son, Adonis.
“We were then granted a piece of land to build the school by Shaikh Rashid Bin Saeed Al Maktoum. Since there was nothing around us but desert, as a field trip, we used to visit the construction site of the new school.”
Alissar said the students would also go to Souq Murshid for field trips and see Shaikh Rashid sitting with merchants. She also remembers going to farms to collect rainwater in buckets.
“We were one of the first private schools in Dubai. We were the first private school to have an Emirati student. I remember his name was Saeed. Back then we mostly catered to the Arab expats of Dubai but today we have more than 60 nationalities in our Mawakeb Schools.”
Alissar said the name Mawakeb, came from a poem. “Back then my father was longing for Lebanon and there was a poem by Kahlil Gibran called Al Mawakeb, it talked about how a group of people left together for the same journey and same purpose, he felt it encompassed his journey in building the school and so named the school after it.”
Among the challenges faced by Nasr at the beginning was finding basic resources in the UAE back then.
‘Charm’
“Those days we couldn’t find desks, there was no catering or restaurants around and finding human resources was also difficult. I remember cleaning the classrooms along with my brothers because there were no cleaners. The bus drivers were also sent to buy food for the school and you would find a French teacher also working as an accountant. There was a charm about this, as it was very family oriented.”
After completing her high school education at Al Mawakeb in 1984 and higher education, (Bachelors in maths from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and a Masters in education from Harvard University) Alissar came back to the school as a maths teacher. As a teacher she believes that the school has accomplished a lot and has been the front-runner in many things.
“We constructed the AMSI curriculum, with the help of many experts, it was tailor-made for the UAE and is built on the best practices from every curriculum. Through this curriculum we have been able to create subjects that are only taught in our school. For example we have a class called 1,001 inventions by Arab and Muslim inventors; it was introduced three years ago and is taught in English and math,” she said.
Alissar said Al Mawakeb was one of the first schools to teach Mandarin, in addition to French and Spanish.”
In addition to Al Mawakeb school in Garhoud, an Al Mawakeb school opened in Al Barsha in 1988 and in 2007 the International School of Arts and Sciences opened as part of the AMSI group.
“We do have plans to expand further, we are studying the prospects of opening another school in Barsha or Khawaneej”, said Alissar.
In celebration of its 35th anniversary the school invited its alumni on Wednesday for a reunion dinner in Dubai. The school brought together 110 parents who went to Al Mawakeb Schools and now have their children enrolled in the school as well.
