Greetings from afar! As I enter this, my wife is negotiating a contract for a three-year university posting in Singapore, to begin in August. Her prospective employer is new to Singapore and so has next to nothing to tell us about primary schools, or even about where we'll be living (in ten weeks!). Our 9-yr-old son is about to finish third grade in our local elementary school, and we have to enter him in school at what looks like the last minute.
The school contribution being offered so far is US$5000 per year, a laughable sum, I know, given the school fees posted by such International Schools as SAS. This has not been an immediate deal-killer for us, as we aren't much interested in coming halfway around the globe to send our son to school with a gang of other American kids. But the local school system (touted highly by in-laws who lived in Singapore for years) operates on the calendar year, and its placement exam isn't till an undetermined date in the fall.
I've gone blind reviewing the school websites, the MoE website, and the school-related posts in this forum, and I've emailed all of the private schools, and a couple of state-supported schools, that looked of interest.
The only encouraging reply I've received is from OFS: open admissions, no registration fee, S$10,000/semester including GST, apparently eager to have us apply. I gather from posts here that OFS is an at least OK school, but not particularly sought after. Can someone tell me why this is so? Any anecdote or biased account will be helpful. Jockney on this forum tells us his son likes the school; if any of you have rejected OFS for your children, please tell us the reasons.
We've been told that we'll be housed near my wife's campus, to which the nearest likely state school is Queenstown Primary. Any knowledge or experience of that school to relate? Our son is excited about living in Singapore, and fearless about negotiating another culture, and--though I say it myself--bright as they come, but he's been nurtured in an ideal environment: 15 kids, all of whom interact beautifully, in his class (one of three third grades in the school), with a really dedicated, loving staff, and all the attention and most of the extras they can handle. All of this for about half of our $4000/yr property tax . . . I'm concerned about class size (and frankly, class, period: posts here give the impression that, in Singapore too, it is as it ever was, that middle-to-upper-class striver parents get the best schools for their kids), facilities, and the flexibility of teaching staff in dealing with expat students. Of course, that said, I have no idea whether Queenstown Primary, or whatever other neighborhood school, will be fully booked by the time placement test results are out.
In our present ignorance, our strategy as presently formulated is this: to enroll our son at OFS for the fall semester, schedule him for the MoE placement exam, whenever that is, tour the local schools, whether Queenstown or otherwise, with available places, and, assuming we like what we see and hear, enroll him for the January term in the best of the lot that's willing to have him. Unless he is, like Jockney, Jr., totally taken by OFS, in which case we'll have to find the money somewhere. All comments on the wisdom or madness of this approach will be hugely, hugely appreciated!
