Checkmate - thanks for your contribution. You obviously knew KIS well, and your description of the school atmosphere is bang on, but unfortunately, your information is out of date by about 6 months, and despite the teachers and principals best efforts, the situation at the school had become much worse. In fact, the school has been moved from Boan to Shekou, and its address, for the time being anyway, is at 51 Yanshan Road, where it occupies the top two floors.

As you mentioned, at the end of the final semester of 2009 all the teachers resigned, with the exception of one Chinese teacher, who was convinced to stay. At the same time, the school lost all but 22 of its students. This meant that the 2009 2010 school year was about to begin with no teachers and few students. Eventually, a new foreign principal was recruited from Canada, and some excellent foreign and Chinese teachers hired in China.

The new school has no gym, nor any science labs. It has no A/V facilities, and even a request for a TV monitor and DVD player were turned down as being too expensive. There is no library worth mentioning. Korean lunches are brought in daily, but there is no cafeteria. There are only 3 old computers for the use of staff and students. In the office, which has recently been moved into the teachers room, there is only one administrative person who speaks Chinese, Korean, and English, so it falls upon this one extraordinarily hard working girl to translate all conversations between management and staff. Of all the deficiencies that needed to be addressed, the only addition this term is a tuck shop, which is being built and operated by some outside party; the school receiving rent for the space. The administration told the teachers the shop had been demanded by the parents.

Most of the Koreans you mention in your posting are no longer visibly associated with the school, but the new ones seem to have a similar attitude to the last bunch. There is a Mr. Li, who is the front man, but apparently, hes a different Mr. Li from the one who was with the school in the past. The new Mr. Li was introduced as the PE teacher, but as an overweight smoker, whos only activity is to stand around, while the kids play ping-pong, it was obvious he was really someone else.

Checkmate, I could go through your posting line by line to bring you up to date on how things have deteriorated (teachers now pay for their own medicals), but Ill just leave it to your imagination.

As I mentioned in my first posting, all of the teachers who were with the school last term, and one who had only recently arrived, walked out on February 24th, and that unbelievably, is the third time this has happened with this school. As any teacher will tell you, conditions have to be dire in order for any of us to consider abandoning our salaries and students, but after being fed a steady diet of lies, late payments, and obvious discrimination against local staff, the teachers at KIS had finally had enough.

Anyone familiar with Dickens will understand my description of this school as Dotheboys Hall