Korea Herald / Kids Herald School in Hwamyeong Busan Korea

Beware of this school, there are some significant issues I dealt with while working there for a year. I would highly recommend looking elsewhere for another school in Korea. The problems with this school were not just for me, but also for the previous teachers that I contacted. I just want to deter those hard working teachers that deserve better than this school. You can read below the details of the problems I faced while working at this school.

I stuck it out for the whole year and even decided to stay another year in Korea BUT definitely not with Korea Herald. The owner of the school, my old boss is Youla Kim and she can be an okay boss at times and when I started I thought she was great. The problems are mainly with Youla not paying my pension and not starting my health care plan at the start of my contract. These things are Korean law and Youla denied that so many times. She would say that the pension office takes months to process my paperwork and start the pension. When I later talked to the pension office about this they told me it takes a simple phone call to start a foreigners pension. The way a pension works in Korea is that the school you're at must pay 4.5% of your salary each month and then you pay the same 4.5% each month. So basically your school matches what you pay each month. At the end of your contract you can then apply to get all that money back from the pension office. So it's a significant amount of money. You not only get what you paid back, you get the matched contribution from your employer. So at the end of a year in Korea if your salary was 2.2million won per month, you would receive almost 2.4 million won back at the end of the year in pension. So this extra bonus is important and it is the law in Korea that employers pay it. In my case Youla lied and didn't start my pension for six months. At the end of the year I tried and tried to get her to back pay the proper amount and she just strait refused. I would have had to get a lawyer and I didn't want to take that rout. I did talk to the previous teachers about all this and apparently they had similar issues where Youla declared their salaries at the pension office to me much lower than the actual amount. By doing this, she didn't have to pay as much pension and they got ripped off too. Sadly the previous teachers never warned me about what she had done to them, I only leaned about it when I was having problems and called them to see if they had experienced anything similar. I lost a good chunk of money because I just didn't know any better and Youla took advantage of me. There were also problems with Youla not starting my health care and saying it was processing for months etc. Just so she could get herself out of a couple months of paying.

I also had problems with my teaching schedule. Youla loved to have me working eight classes in a row with only five minute breaks in between the classes. The breaks were usually filled with walking the students down to the bus. This meant that for dinner I was grabbing crackers from my desk and trying to eat them as I walked the students down to the bus. It was a crazy schedule that left no time for decent prep and left me strung out a lot of the time.

The bottom line is that maybe this isn't the worst school out there but I would recommend looking elsewhere! The recruiting agency that got me the job (Recruiting Busan Inc.) advertises that their jobs pay health care and pension but when I asked them to help me fight it they basically said I was on my own. Usually once a recruiter gets you to Korea and gets their money from the school, they don't really care about you. They're done their job so to speak and they move on to the next person.

Luckily this school didn't stop me from still having an amazing time in Korea and I made the choice to do another year and it's been a million times better at another school. I just feel like I need to give some warming to other hard working teachers out there that may get stuck at Korea Herald when they could have done much better.

Good luck!