If you ask any international or independent school educator about the benefits of teaching at their school, you’re likely to hear about free tuition for dependents.\u00a0 Before I had any kids myself I thought little about this benefit for obvious reasons, but also because I’ve taken for granted the relatively great education I received in US public schools.\u00a0 It wasn’t until I started working at a K-12 international school that I realized the enormous benefit of working at a great school with excellent teachers who would one day teach my children.<\/p>\n
If you’re like me, a product of the US public school system, then you grew up in the same classroom as the children of the school’s secretary, principal, and custodian.\u00a0 However, in international schools this isn’t as a common.\u00a0 Instead of extending tuition benefits to all employee’s dependents they are often only extended to the faculty.\u00a0 Even in many NAIS schools you’re unlikely to find the custodian or lunch personnel receiving this benefit.\u00a0 In a recent conversation with an independent school administrator, he laughed (and cringed), at the feeling that his children had been providing the social economic diversity to a school filled with much wealthier students.<\/p>\n
This isn’t to say that there aren’t good reasons to limit tuition benefits.\u00a0 For many schools, allowing even one or two students per staff member could balloon the school population by hundreds.\u00a0 In international schools the difference between host culture curriculum and international school curriculum could cause some major hiccups in the school learning environment.\u00a0 Furthermore, universal tuition benefits could lead to great divides and more cliques in the school.\u00a0 Not to mention that this makes the assumption that international or independent schools automatically offer a better opportunity for the host culture’s community.<\/p>\n
Yet, I believe if done correctly, universal tuition benefits, might answer many problems our school’s face.\u00a0 For instance, it would certainly lead to a stronger connection with the surrounding\u00a0 community, new perspectives in the classroom, increased loyalty by employees, etc.\u00a0 Also in cases where schools are inundated with a core student population that isn’t from it’s host culture, it would lead to increased diversity in every way.<\/p>\n
Whether or not universal tuition benefits are the right fit for your school, in an education atmosphere that often speaks of diversity, global awareness, and outreach, the practice is bound to help model and strengthen these values.<\/p>\n
So what do you think?\u00a0 Does your school offer universal tuition benefits?\u00a0 Has it been discussed?\u00a0 Do you think it would be helpful or more harmful?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you ask any international or independent school educator about the benefits of teaching at their school, you’re likely to hear about free tuition for dependents.\u00a0 Before I had any kids myself I thought little about this benefit for obvious reasons, but also because I’ve taken for granted the relatively great education I received in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1516,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1514","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5BJbv-oq","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1514"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1514\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1514"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1514"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/learnedleadership.org\/divi\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1514"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}