Shopping for Primary Schools

It's amazing, sometimes I feel like we just moved to Hong Kong but it has almost been 3 years. Isabella started her formal schooling in HK by enrolling in nursery or K1 as it's known here in August 2009 and now it's time to choose her primary school. Unlike the majority of HK parents, Jonathan and I were not concerned too much about sending her to so-called "Band 1" schools. These are the schools that are well-known in HK, high tuition fees, EMI (English as the medium of instruction), and located in posh areas.

No, we were just asking three questions:
1) Is it walking distance from our place?
2) Is the school CMI (Chinese as medium of instruction)?; and
3) Does the school offer extra support for non-native Chinese speakers?

These questions were in no particular order as they were all equally important to us as I believe one's school should be part of their immediate community, that the girls should learn Cantonese as that was a big reason why we moved to HK, and that we are not able to support them in their Chinese homework as we do not read or write Chinese.

I must admit that I got a little swept up in the frenzy of choosing a primary school when a colleague/friend, who also has a son Bella's age, started asking me about my options and my aims for her education. She laughed when I mentioned the proximity factor but nodded understandingly when I explained my learning-in-Chinese factor. We started calling (on the phone and in person) the schools that we were interested in and asked them whether they had open houses for prospective students' parents but most of them were unresponsive and couldn't fully answer our plethora of questions that betrayed us as parents going through this for the first time.

Then in the beginning of September, a bunch of notices from Bella's kindergarten school poured in. They were invitations to open houses, trial classes, parents' nights, to all the primary schools in our home area. I mean, the school administrators could have told us that when we were calling the schools ourselves then all of our questions and hypothetical situations would be answered.

TIP for expat parents of primary-ready kids in HK: all of the open houses and such happen in the period of August - September, but especially the real push comes in early September.

So every weekend this month, we've been spending time at different primary schools talking to different teachers, curriculum directors, students and principals about Bella and her needs. At all of the schools, we met non-native Chinese (e.g. South India, Caucasian, Korean) students who spoke Cantonese and Putonghua as fluently as far as I can tell. It's really amazing coming from a largely monolinguistic society (Toronto, Canada) that multi-lingualism comes so naturally to kids. To all of you out there who can speak more than one language, do not deny this gift to your own kids.

Finally, we chose a primary school that we had visited first. (It's always the first dress that you saw that you eventually buy - lol). It satisfies our three criteria and we get a good feeling from talking to the teachers and students. It also is a mixed socio-economic student population which will hopefully expose Bella to different types of people and their priorities.

But best of all, it's a comfortable 6 minute walk from our flat.