Big school? Small school?
Here’s a continuation on this experience as we’ve checked around. In our “zone” there are two other schools, one larger (it used to be an overfill school) and one smaller. The smaller one has something like 5 classes/grade where the bigger two have 10+. The smaller school also seems to have a class size of around 20 whereas the bigger schools are near the max of 30. This is the difference between going to a school with 100 first graders and going to one with 350+ first graders. For Taiwanese, I suspect that in general a longer line and more students are associated with higher quality, whereas for foreigners we’d probably rather have a smaller class. We’re leaning now towards the smaller school.
Xinsheng, Shidong, Neihu
I also visited Xinsheng Elementary and talked to Ms. Peng, who administers the program for new arrivals there. In Taipei there are three schools where students can transfer for two years to have special CSL instruction. In theory the goal of these programs is to get kids up to speed so that they could enter a regular class. The schools are Xinsheng, Shidong (in Tianmu) and a school in Neihu. My understanding from Ms. Peng (who was great) is that you first register at your local school and then apply for the transfer to another school. The students in these schools spend a majority of their time in the regular class, but are pulled out for special sessions for non-native speakers (she said it’s often 7 hours a week for those who are struggling but could be less for those with more Chinese background). Xinsheng is a fairly gigantic school, so the regular classes there would all be at around 30. She said there are around 50 international students in the school, but I don’t know the breakdown (i.e. Japanese, Indonesian, Canadian, etc.).
Enrollment
There are also some questions I still don’t totally understand. It seems like in Taiwan if we you have left for more than three months it “resets” your priority for the regular school draw (like the big school next door) and you go to the back of the line, but to qualify for a program like Xinsheng I think in theory you should be coming in from abroad fairly recently (I don’t know if it’s within the last two years or if one needed to be abroad for two years).
Other Considerations
It also sounds like these aren’t magic programs. She said that older kids are often really bored and fall asleep in regular classes. I think coming in with no Chinese it would be a pretty rocky entrance. I did talk to her about our three and the challenges for how to handle it. She said it’s just a challenge to do both Chinese and English.
My hope with this is to say “here’s a possible system” if you’re looking for an entry point to the Taiwanese education system. At the same time, she said most foreign students go to international schools and I think these programs are still not an easy path. Certainly a lot would depend on the specific kid and the parents’ time and resources.