The private schools have recently started trying to match the public school contract, in the past year or so to my knowledge. However, the public school contract doesn’t seem to be clear, particularly on the flight reimbursement.
What I’ve heard is that it’s up 80k TWD for you(teacher) + up to 80k TWD for your spouse and children, for a round trip flight. Many of us have our spouses and children here as well.
Can any public school teachers confirm this about the flight reimbursement? And, any idea why this is not made clear in the contract? Public School Contract Website Link
Public school teacher here. It’s not made clear in the contract purposefully so that the local school has some leeway in how they want to interpret it.
In my experience, they try every excuse in the book to deny applications for reimbursement. Delay, delay, ask for more proof, stamps, delay, lose paperwork, and then oh no it’s more than three months after your flight, it’s too late now sorry~
I haven’t worked at a public school in a while and it’s probably been 10 years since I have had to do this but I don’t remember the language in the contract being the issue. At the first school I worked at I was the first foreign teacher they ever had and they had it in their heads that I had to go after I had completed the contract, July 31, but that’s not the case. And the next public school I worked at, I got the job through a recruiter and I think he intentionally screwed me, saying that I would have to do mandatory training in early August and would not be able to use the flight, but suddenly the mandatory training got kicked back almost until the end of August.
With other teachers that I worked with in the program, they would say that they had to fight kinda hard to get it, for others it was smooth, but in the end, most teachers got it. One teacher in particular was from South Africa but her family was living in Europe, I think France. She would fly there and every year after being promised the flight to France, there would be some big argument and technicality being sited, but in the end, she got it, but only after a lot of hassle. For the job that I got screwed on in the beginning, I was able to get half my flight paid for because I didn’t renew that contract, so they could have paid a one way, but they were okay to pay for half a round trip, which is usually cheaper anyway.
For me, this vague part about the flight reimbursement is the major problem, and in contrast to what I’ve been told. So it would be really helpful for if they clarified the flight reimbursement. Or someone could help clarify it.
Can you be more specific about what you don’t understand or what you think is unclear?
I remember on an old contract there was something about the flight reimbursement being to the capital city of one’s passport country. But that’s just really weird. I mean if you were from California but had to fly to DC, that would really suck. But from what I remember, they never really followed that.
It says that they will reimburse airfare to the nearest airport where you’re from. But I don’t think that really matters. To be honest, I even heard about some teachers from the US getting a free flight to Hawaii… not bad! They may want to stop this form of “abuse” however. The last time I got my airfare reimbursed I did not go directly back to my home city, I first visited some relatives on the East Coast instead and that was no problem. But they did not cover the one way flight that I took to my home city, but that wasn’t a big deal, only cost me like $200.
It says “previous place of employment” too, so I guess if you had been working in Japan before you could get a ticket to go back there. They added in the part about spouse and direct relatives (could be parents or children) then that would cover the one teacher I wrote about who was South African but whose parents lived in Europe.
I can’t read the Chinese, but it seems that they have actually made it more clear than before and are allowing for more exceptions than in the past. Getting them to actually do it is another story though.
