Blacklist of schools

Amy and Candy are just as nasty. Stay away from them, too!

Hehehe. Well, it might be a good time to repost this:[quote=“Durins Bane”]Folks,

I think a thread like this can be of great help. But I ask all of you to post in a responsible manner.


We also suggest that you have a solid case against the school or at least a valid argument or complaint. No, “Hey man, I got fired because I was drunk and was twirling my meat in the classroom. That’s totally unfair.” type stuff.

Please be aware that schools will have an equal opportunity to respond.

Regards,

Durins Bane
Co-Moderator
Teaching Forum[/quote]

[quote=“yaoshema”]
For chrissake, DON’T WAIT 3 months or until you’ve left the country. File a complaint IMMEDIATELY, I think it needs to be done within 30 days —if you want to stay in the country past your ARC. If you file a complaint, you can’t leave the ‘country’ until the case is resolved.[/quote]

I didn’t wait until I left the country. I set the ball rolling as soon as I quit, using my Taiwanese friend as a representative.

“[color=#004000]If you file a complaint, you can’t leave the ‘country’ until the case is resolved.[/color]”

Gosh, I wish I’d known about this, especially considering how many phone calls I made. It was only just after getting through to a foreigners’ toll-free ‘help-line’ to actually give someone my name that 
 I was told I had three days to be off island or in deep doo doo.

Learning Seed school in Zhunan, Miaoli County.

I was fired today because I had to stay in Australia for an extra week to settle my late fathers affairs. The school was notified that I would be late and they were disappointed but said to come back regardless.

After great expense, I did as they asked and was then told today that they have replaced me with somebody younger.

This is after paying me 48,000 NT for 120 teaching hours during Summer Camp. When I asked about the low salary they turned it around and told me what a bad teacher I was, and said they were ‘helping’ me by giving me a large class. It will help me to grow!

Avoid this toxic school like the plague. They have a long history of retarded decisions in regards to hiring and firing teachers. I am just the latest on a long list of teachers both foreign and local that have been screwed over by this place.

The boss doesn’t speak English and the first time I actually sat down to ‘speak’ to her (via her lackey) was this week. That’s the ONLY time in 5 months.

It’s a real shame because the kids are great and its a beautiful school. One of (if not the) most expensive schools in this area.

Now I have been given 2 weeks to clear out my apartment and find a new job. Did I mention that I have about 3,000 NT to my name? :frowning:

Could you post any details of that Pubba?

I could but it’s only 2nd hand stuff that I have heard from locals and staff there


They had a guy working there who convinced the boss that he could bring in hundreds of well paying high school students. The boss then spent millions of NT building extensions to the school and advertising. They had 1 or 2 students sign up


After the expenses they couldnt offer the re-siging teachers a raise in their salary, so I think some of them didn’t come back.

They had an excellent foreign english department manager who they replaced without telling her, and then offered her a really shitty package in compensation. Of course, she declined and left.

One of their kindy teachers was an older gent who went a bit nuts and started swearing and muttering in front of the kids. The co teachers were terrified.

The teacher before me was a notorious party animal who let the kids play basketball a lot of the time. They fired him and offered me 1000NT an hour to sign a contract. This was for 1.5 hours work a day or 30k a month. They then changed my hours from midday to 6pm and changed the hourly rate to something like 390 NT an hour.

They get teachers to agree to shit with promises of champagne ‘later’ which then never comes around.

There is heaps more dodgey history that people only hinted at. This school is a disaster.

I suggest you avoid Penguin Happy Family School (Aslo known as Anita’s
something or other) in ShuLin at all costs. They’re located not too far down the road from the back exit of the train station.

I was working a summer camp for them this past summer when one morning my wife came down sick with something and needed me to take her to the doctor. She doesn’t drive a car and her scooter was at our school. So I called just over 2 hours before my class, told my “supervisor” that I wouldn’t be able to come in, as I had no idea how long it would take us because my wife needed to go to an actual hospital. She called me back five minutes later and told me the boss, Anita, said not to bother coming back in at all. After I’d covered her classes for her two days in a row two weeks back.

Alas, there was no contract or written agreement of any kind between myself and the school, so I had to just take the hit and roll with it. Raising hell would have been more trouble than it was worth.

So yeah, don’t work for this asshat “school”, they’ll just do anything they can to screw you over.

I worked at Effective International English, a business English consulting service in Taipei, for about two years. They get great students - especially the top level managers if you can teach them one-on-one. You have to travel around Taipei and possibly even to Hsinchu, however. I don’t drive, and working a full time schedule I found it necessary to take taxis almost all the time. It wasn’t worth it spending an hour getting somewhere in order to save $200NT. EIE will tell you they cover transportation, but the amount they cover was about 1/2-1/3 of costs. I was spending a total of about $10,000 a month on taxis.
This, however, is trivial compared to what happened when I tried to leave the job. It starts with the employment contract, which offers you two benefits only: an ARC and hourly pay. Every other item in the contract is there to protect them against you. A number of teachers were never permitted to leave the building with a copy of their employment contract, while others were. I was refused the right to a copy of my employment contract on three occasions. The strange justification for not giving you a copy is that someone might use it to start their own business.
Not having a copy of the contract becomes significant if you try to leave before your ARC expires, or have any other difficulty with them: Since you don’t actually know what you agreed to, they can imply anything they like to manipulate you. There are no “deposits,” but they try to control you with the threat of fines written into the contract. For each class you accept, you sign a separate contract that stipulates you will pay $26,000NT if you do not finish teaching the course. If you hesitate to sign, they may say not to worry about it, that they never enforce this as long as you are reasonable, and that it does not have the status of a fully legal contract, it is just a sort of agreement between private citizens. But that’s not what happened when I tried to leave.
I had warned them that I was looking for a better job, and the reasons why. So they should not have been surprised when I gave notice of my departure. I asked if they could afford to let me go in two weeks, but expected I would have to give them the 30 days notice mentioned in the employment contract. I wasn’t too surprised that they would not do me a favor and let me leave in two weeks, but I was shocked when I was told that they would NOT let me go
until I completed all courses, which meant several months.
They did not provide a contract termination letter on request, which was necessary to take the new job. The first time they called me to come get the letter, they did not bring up the issue of fines until after I’d arrived. At that point, they expected me to pay them roughly $80,000NT in order to leave the job. The second time they called me to get the letter they lowered the fine but requested that I teach each class twice without pay. That still added up to a substantial amount of money. By that time I had been to the Labor Bureau to file a report questioning these fines: How can the contract say you must give 30 days notice, but then you are also subject to fines if you do? Isn’t that a contradiction? The labor bureau forwarded my case to the Council of Labor Affairs. I informed the CLA that I was no longer getting hours at the old job, but could not start the new one because of the letter. The CLA stated that 1) you have a right to a copy of your contract, 2) it is unreasonable to have an employer prevent you from taking another job for several months, and 3) the maximum fine that teachers usually paid in a situation like that was about $20,000NT. The CLA then set a mediation date for the following week and informed my employer. Immediately after that, EIE became fully cooperative about providing the letter and dropped all suggestion of fines in order to avoid mediation. I settled with them before the mediation date. However it took me not 30, but 60 days to end my relationship with them. I lost about $50,000NT of income at my new job, and finishing classes at EIE made up for only 20,000 of that. So they still managed to cost me $30,000NT for leaving the job.
Before this experience, I had never imagined a job you couldn’t quit–not in a modern country–but EIE doesn’t believe you have a right to quit or a right to take another job. Of course most Westerners assume the right to labor freely is fundamental and given by nature, and find it hard to take any limitations of that right seriously. And though it may have been different in the past, Taiwan law now seems pretty much like Western law in these regards.
Adventurous people might decide to brave the situation. If you really want to teach business English to managers, this is one place you can find great students. Many of us don’t realize is that we can bargain over every item in a contract, as long as you are willing to walk away without signing. Since you don’t have to work at the office, it can be tolerable. But be ready to deal with management that will tell you whatever is necessary to get you to do what they want. For example, when negotiating pay, if they suggest the possibility of a bonus at the end of the year, don’t expect one–they’re just saying that to get you to accept rate they are offering. So any brave soul who wants negotiating experience can give it a try, but be prepared.

I want to warn all teachers in Taiwan against the adult English school, Richmond in Tauyuan, Taiwan.
All seems extremely professional when you first walk in and start working there, but let me tell you, it’s only a smoke screen.
They lie about:
*The amount of teaching hours you’ll get, as promised in their ad on Tealit and in the interview.
*Teaching mainly adults, (you teach a lot of children)
*Hourly pay regarding one on one’s
*Student complaints (they make false claims)

They call you ‘in’ almost every 2nd night (after 9pm), to criticize you on petty issues, for example: “You don’t stand enough in class”, “Chinese children find it traumatizing when you rip paper”.

They sometimes have a list of up to 6 students (adults and children) who apparently complained about you in one day. But after careful investigation,
you find out, it’s either entirely made up or absolutely blown out of proportion. They break down your character in every possible way they can. Even made some teachers write letters of self-criticism after watching a Chinese ‘teacher’ give a demo.

Threatening is part of the ‘highly professional working environment’, so get used to that once you start. Your ARC and NT15 000 deposit will be held like a dangling carrot in front of a donkey.

I was fired on Saturday, and given 7 days notice (and 5.5 working hours for the next week). Also, if I told any of my students I’m leaving, my deposit will be held back.
My ARC was immediately canceled, please note, this is in the middle of the semester, in the middle of the month, not an abundance of full time jobs floating around in Taoyuan.

The reason for letting me go: ‘you don’t fit in’ - even though my adult classes became so packed, some evenings there weren’t enough seating for everyone.

There’s a TV commercial of Richmond on Youtube with me in it, I was never asked to be video taped, and most definitely not paid for it.

Can anyone please give some advice on how to expose or deal with this school?

Sacred Heart Elementary School in Keelung (Jilong) City and its recruiter Paul O’Sullivan of Go2TeachEnglish.com promises that if you buy an airline ticket and come to their school you will receive a working permit and an ARC within 60 days. They require that you arrive on a 60 day visitor visa. After your visa runs out they will not have a working permit or an ARC for you. Then you will be required to go on visa runs every time your visitor visa is about to expire. In February of 2009, Sacred Heart School fired all of its teachers who did not have ARCs. This was not the fault of the teachers, rather the fault of the school and the recruiter. Sacred Heart is authorized by the Taiwanese government to hire only eight foreign teachers, and yet they insist on hiring double that number. When the teachers wise up and leave, they are replaced with fresh meat supplied by the recruiter, Go2TeachEnglish.
Currently Sacred Heart is being sued by three teachers who were fired, not because they deserved to be fired, but because the school wanted to make those teachers disappear before an immigration sweep. The school is being investigated by the Taiwanese Justice Department.
I worked there in November and December of 2008 and quit after realizing that they had made promises they could not and would not keep. The turnover was very high because if you teach illegally and get caught you face deportation for five years.
The school would like to pretend that they never had Deon, Elle, Jacquie, Mark, Max, Willem, and many other American, South African, and Canadian teachers on the payroll illegally, but the fact is, we were there, we were paid in cash, the government never got payroll taxes from us, and we were swept out like trash. Don’t be deceived by their promises, which include higher than average salaries (75,000 typically), a 1,200 NT dorm room, 500 NT cleaning service, and 400NT a month internet.
You will never get your papers and work legally, and sooner or later you will see the light and quit, or they will show you the door.

CCTV, Channel 4, April 3. 7p.m. Taiwan News. Sacred Heart School in Keelung (Jilong) City was raided by immigration officials and found to be in violation of their permit to hire 7 English teachers. The school had illegally hired another 11 teachers. The dormitory was full of newly hired teachers, many of whom had been hired to replace illegally fired teachers who were swept out of the school like trash because their visas had been used up. Four of these wronged teachers are suing the school for breach of contract. The teachers caught up in the sweep are in legal limbo, facing large fines and deportation. The real criminals in this case are Sacred Heart School, its principal, the archdiocese of the Catholic Church in Keelung (Jilong) City, and Go2TeachEnglish and its agent, Paul O’Sullivan. These are the people in Taiwan who lured teachers out of the United States and other countries with the promise of a job, working papers and an ARC. The principal of the school, the supervisor of the foreign teachers, Moon Lin, and the recruiters all knew that they were acting in violation of the law and yet continued to hire and fire teachers illegally. It even turns out that Go2TeachEnglish.com is not registered to operate as a recruiting agency in Taiwan and has been operating illegally for a number of years. They will face their own legal consequences.

The teachers who were victimized by this culture of dishonesty are not the bad guys in this case. They deserve to have their fines paid by the school, and if Taiwan was a just and kind host country, which it appears it is not, the government here would find new jobs for these teachers who were duped by the school and the recruiters. Hopefully the four teachers who are suing the school for breach of contract win their case, and this becomes a springboard for real change in the hiring and recruiting practices of English teachers in Taiwan. If Taiwan truly hopes to improve the state of English education in its schools, it must begin by treating its guest teachers with respect. That would begin with an accurate description of the job, a working permit before arrival, and an ARC. Being required to do visa runs to stay on the right side of the law is an insult to degreed professionals.

The principal of Sacred Heart stated in faculty meetings more than once that he knew his teachers were working illegally, but he was working on it. In fact, there was no attempt to legalize the teachers, and pay was given in cash, in the hope that the lack of a paper trail would fool the tax authority. He also stated that he had no idea that there was a limit on the number of teachers he was allowed to hire. If that is the case, he is obviously incompetent and should tender his resignation. But this is not the case. The man is a liar and should be fired, fined, and jailed.

It’s hard to imagine that Sacred Heart would attempt to fill the dorm with new teachers yet again after the glare of negative publicity this week, but don’t count on it. Once again, beware their offers of employment. They are a criminal enterprise.

[quote=“brian”]Not wanting to knock the value of such a thread on this forum, but such lists already exist.

A blacklist of bad schools, and more importantly a greenlist of good schools can be found at buxiban.com[/quote]

I followed that link and it looks like that buxiban.com link directs to an generic Search/Ad site. The greenlist idea is great though, and just as important as a blacklist.

Too all: Do/Did you have a good experience? There is a new "[url=http://tw.forumosa.com/t/greenlist-of-schools/55698/1 posted. Put that knowledge to use and post it on the “Greenlist” thread forum. It’s much appreciated by me and others!

Richmond and Jane Eyre schools must be candidates for this thread.

Stay away from Richmond international English institute (Taoyuan city) and Melton American School (close to Yang Mei and Jhongli).

Why?

Yes, any details?

Regarding Richmond:

I want to warn all teachers in Taiwan against the adult English school, Richmond International English Institute, aka ç‘žć„‡è’™ćœ‹éš›çŸŽèȘž, in Taoyuan, Taiwan.
All seems extremely professional when you first walk in and start working there, but let me tell you, it’s only a smoke screen.
They lie about:
*The amount of teaching hours you’ll get, as promised in their ad on Tealit and in the interview.
*Teaching mainly adults, (you teach a lot of children)
*Hourly pay regarding one on one’s
*Student complaints (they make false claims)

They call you ‘in’ almost every 2nd night (after 9pm), to criticize you on petty issues, for example: “You don’t stand enough in class”, “Chinese children find it traumatizing when you rip paper”.

They sometimes have a list of up to 6 students (adults and children) who apparently complained about you in one day. But after careful investigation,
you find out, it’s either entirely made up or absolutely blown out of proportion. They break down your character in every possible way they can. Even made some teachers write letters of self-criticism after watching a Chinese ‘teacher’ give a demo.

Threatening is part of the ‘highly professional working environment’, so get used to that once you start. Your ARC and NT15 000 deposit will be held like a dangling carrot in front of a donkey.

I was fired on Saturday, and given 7 days ‘verbal’ notice (and 5.5 working hours for the next week). Also, if I told any of my students I’m leaving, my deposit will be held back.
My ARC was immediately canceled, please note, this is in the middle of the semester, in the middle of the month, not an abundance of full time jobs floating around in Taoyuan.

The reason for letting me go: ‘you don’t fit in’ - even though my adult classes became so packed, some evenings there weren’t enough seating for everyone.

There’s a TV commercial of Richmond on Youtube with me in it (youtube.com/watch?v=GQzRZnoO800), I was never asked to be video taped, and most definitely not paid for it.

(please read my separate thread: “DO NOT WORK FOR RICHMOND”)

Melton American School in Pingchen city (close to Jhongli in Taoyuan county) should be avoided at all cost.
They have a cheating and lying admin. I worked there for 18 months and by the time I got fired (for I don’t know what sound reason) none of the original staff was left. That includes the Chinese teachers except for the 2 most horrible female teachers that you can imagine to work with. They run the school with lies, gossip and dumb decisions - that’s why you see their ad so frequently on Tealit.
Be prepared to get criticized for every effort and to hear whatever you do is never good enough. One of my colleagues simply threatened that he would report them if they don’t do what he wants and it worked every time. Shows you what they are busy with.

Here’s another one:

The worst school to work for in Taiwan is Stanford American Language School in Jhunan with branches in Jhubei and 2 in Hsinshu.
They can teach Hitler and his Gestapo some lessons in cruelty.
When I complained and said I got some legal advice I got fired on the spot. They took $30 000 deposit from me and gave me about 2 hours to leave the school and their dorm.After some threats from an agent I got my deposit back but they still didn’t pay me what they were supposed to.
No teacher ever finished their contracts with Stanford, as far as I know. They’re also advertising regularly on Tealit.
The only guy who finished his contract was one without an ARC - because he had no choice.
I was so traumatized I nearly left Taiwan after that, but fortunately, I found some good and honorable people to work for. Now I am in love with Taiwan and wish I could stay here for the rest of my life.