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Trouble In Finding a Primary One School
Jon Mariano In Hong Kong children starts school very early at age 3. I thought that Philippine children are starting to get pressured and do the same. I believe this is not right. Children should be allowed to be children and have more play than rigid schooling. But in Hong Kong it has been like that for a long time and it's not going to change soon.
There was one parent who did a silly protest by not sending his daughter to school. The government was about to force him and his child but he sent her to the Mainland China instead. She studied there for some time, but in the end she ended up coming back to school in Hong Kong.
At the age of 3, kids start to go to Kindergarten 1, then 2, then 3. Next is Primary 1 to 6 and then move on to Secondary 1 to 4. Our kid will go to primary 1 next school year, which starts in September.
Hong Kong has a pretty complicated way of allocating children to schools. You start by applying with the government where you put in your preferred schools. You have so many choices, and it follows that all the parents would choose the best schools (by name and fame) for their children and not all therefore will be admitted because there are limits to how many children a school can handle. This process takes almost one year to complete!
If in the first selection process (schools have the choice to select which students to accept) your child was not admitted to your preferred school, the second round (the government will allocate children automatically) will come and you do the same exercise again. In this stage, all incoming primary 1 students get a place, but may not be to their most preferred one. Tough if it happens, and it did to us! Our kid was allocated to our 4th most preferred school.
Next thing we can do is apply to our preferred school directly with the principal. You can just imagine what kind of trouble awaits us together with thousands of other angry and exasperated parents! But that's how it is, you got to dance with the music because it's the only music in town. Another option would be to go to an international school, but tuition is mind boggling. It starts from 5,000 Hong Kong Dollars (HKD) per month! That's equivalent to almost 40,000 pesos a month, something that we cannot afford.
Our preferred school is local Chinese, as our kid should be forced to learn the language. Hopefully we will be able to solve this unpleasant problem we're having right now!
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