We are interested in enrolling our daughter in the CSL program at Xinsheng Elementary School for this school year. Their application information states that they require a copy of a parent’s employment certificate. My husband and I are both on sabbatical this year and will not have any employment in Taiwan. We may do limited work with our employers in the U.S. though. Has anyone been able to enroll their child in the Xinsheng Elementary CSL program without the employment certification? When I talked with the director there last year, it sounded like this was a definite requirement. I called again recently, and the lady I spoke with at the school could not give me an answer and told me to call back next week to speak with someone else (a Teacher Liu who is currently on vacation).
I’m unsure of your residency status but an open work permit generally is fine for this kind of thing.
I will have a TARC and plan to apply for a work permit, so maybe that will be sufficient. Thanks!
I am curious if you were able to resolve the employment certification for Xinsheng Elementary School without having a job? We do not have a TARC. We are intending to obtain an open work permit by getting the Taiwan Employment Gold Card. We expect it will take some time for us to find a job so wanted to know if it was possible to enroll our son in the CSL program at Xinsheng with only a work permit and not an actual job.
We ended up going with a different local school for our kids, so I never got an answer to this. I imagine an open work permit with the Gold Card would be okay, but it’s best to ask the school directly. Best of luck!
This is kind of a nuclear option, but we were trying to figure out how foreigners without hukou would do on getting into local school. I went in person to city hall and asked in the education department for someone to help explain the requirements to me. I got about an hour with two anxious young women who kept trying to get me to leave. The upside was that I learned that our immigration records would count for our “waiting in line,” which the local school did not appear to know.
I would be amazed if a school can require an employment certificate to attend, although we’d also looked at some bilingual schools in the south and it did seem like sometimes they were designed for the children of “returning” scientists and industrialists.
I’ll also say that AFAIK the Xinsheng program is only doing something like a few hours a week of CSL and it may be better to just do a local school and get a tutor. I believe after a year or two they also require you to leave Xinsheng and return to your home school (whatever that is).
Thank Mamabear and Teach for the information. The current CLP administrator recently confirmed via e-mail that the open-end work permit provided through the Gold Card Visa program is not sufficient to satisfy the over-one-year employment certificate requirement for applicants with an ARC that want to enroll their child in the CLP program at Xinsheng.
Since we will not be in a position to obtain the employment certificate, as suggested, we considered other public schools. However, based off the information we have found on Forumosa, especially the helpful information Teach has provided on other posts, it appears that getting into a public primary school is quite complicated for individuals that have no prior relationship with Taiwan and there is a great deal of uncertainty as to which school your child will end up at due to some certain schools having higher demand than others.
Accordingly, we believe the most practical choice for enrolling our two kids a the first and third grade level is to seek enrollment in private schools such as Lih-Jen International or Montessori schools.
no. If your kids are on ARCs, it is not such complicated. You just need to go to the school in your school district with an application form (外籍)國小適齡兒童入學申請書.doc and ARC.
If the school in your school district is full, they are sent to nearby schools, though education at those schools may not be greatly different from each other.
I probably made it sound harder than it is. We wanted the school next to our house and it seemed stupid to me that they were going to make us go to a school 20 minutes away (we don’t have a car). It turned out we could use our ARC and immigration records to “line up” for the local school and got in.
(Parenthetically, I think it’s stupid that Xinsheng would require an employer contract, and this is why I would try to check with the Ed. Dep. if at all possible.)
You shouldn’t have a problem getting into a local public elementary school in Taipei with ARCs. That’s what we have for ourselves and our children, and it wasn’t too complicated. Our assigned school (based on our residence address on our ARC) was full for my daughter’s grade by the time we arrived in Taipei (early August right before the start of the school year), so the school administration gave us a transfer form, which allowed us to enroll at any of the other elementary schools in our district (there were 3 other choices for us, which luckily were about equal distance from our home). It was a pretty easy process overall. In Taipei, there are usually a number of options for public elementary schools in one neighborhood. I suggest calling or walking in to a school to talk to the administration there about your chances of enrolling your child.
Yikes, I didn’t realize that the Gold Card was not sufficient for the Xinsheng CLP. What are my best options for a bilingual program for my 1st grade son if we are on a gold card with no domestic employer? Thanks!
Easy. Open your own company and sign your own work permit.