This year, however, we've learned that only 51% of our operating costs come from the government. Yep, as a public school only half of our funding (outside of salary) comes from the government. How are we making ends meet? We bill the families of our students directly.
A number of our students come from overseas. This phenomenon isn't new to the teachers at my school. We've seen these students in our classrooms for years, and are all thoroughly acclimated to hearing Korean, Chinese, Thai and other Asian languages spoken around school grounds. While most of these students have immigrated with their families intact and now have resident status, some students are sent to us by parents who continue to live and earn money in their mother countries. This latter class of student students are charged an arm and a leg to attend our school. International student fees this year are $12,000NZ but you won't find that price tag anywhere on the school website. We're able to get away with this because, well, we have to. If the Ministry of Education isn't going to pay for more classrooms to accommodate our bulging population, and the "suggested donation" of roughly $400 asked of families isn't cutting it, how else do we raise funds? Pull out a loan?
It certainly doesn't lessen the temptation to charge parents when the families of international students often times have the money to send their kids abroad. Market forces are driving this little problem: foreign families want top-quality language instruction for their children to help them compete in a highly-competitive business field, while we scratch our heads and wonder how to pay the bills. As a staff we've decided that this needs to stop. We shouldn't be forced to look at students as merely a revenue stream. At the moment, we, along with a number of other schools in our area, are pressuring the Ministry of Education to fix the situation. These foreign families are already dealing the pressure of sacrificing their living arrangements for their childrens' education. We're getting stonewalled by the ministry, of course, and are being told that according to funding formulae we are getting more than enough to keep things running. So it goes.
This article in the New York Times sums up the trend of the Korean pre-brain drain very well. Essentially, South Koreans are becoming disillusioned with their high pressure education system, particularly access to English education that is perceived to be severely lacking. Mothers are taking their children to New Zealand, Australia, Canada and the US in droves, leaving the fathers behind to work and pay for this on-sight English training. The goal is to get the kids into top tier universities in South Korea and the US. The side effect is, unfortunately, stressed parents and youngsters who are left trying to make sense of the value of this "trade-off."
It's hard to watch human-scale effect of this globally-scaled trend. We just finished with our first big round of parent-teacher interview nights. I have yet to meet an international student's father at one of these evenings. We have translators on staff to help us communicate with the mothers who frequently don't have the vocabulary to ask me questions. Many of my students act as translators, and I tell most of them to tell their mothers that I say that they are doing a superb job. The boys always get embarrassed and the moms always get a little misty eyed. It's never easy assuring these lone mothers that their sons are doing one helluva job balancing the gift that their parents are giving them with the pressures of growing up, even if that isn't necessarily reflected in their exam scores.
