Difficult School Choices

Choosing a schooling option for your Third Culture Kid (TCK – the new term for Missionary Kid – MK or any child growing up in another culture) can be quite a stressful and difficult decision.  For some missionaries, their options are very limited and home schooling might be the only option.  For others however, there might be the option to send their children to a local or international school (either boarding or as a day student).  These options are often combined with home schooling.

After 10 years in Thailand we have been through almost every option with our kids.  It started with a local Thai schools combined with some home schooling.  Then it was home schooling full time.  Now all our kids are at an international school (as a day student).

Each time the decision the change schooling option has not been easy and things have not turned out as we had hoped.  The ideal situation would have been our kids attending local schools and speaking Thai fluently and eventually sometime in highschool shifting to an international school to prepare to tertiary education back in Australia.

It started off almost to plan with the 3 kids at that time going to a local Thai school and being fluent in Thai.  However, we had an unexpected home assignment for a year due to health of my father and our kids lost most of their Thai.  Then we changed ministries and were involved in ministry where our kids were with other Australian missionary kids and there were no appropriate local school options. 

By the time we moved to Chiang Mai, a large city in North Thailand with lots of expats, with our kids much older and with hardly any Thai, the local Thai school option would not work.  Homeschooling was an option which we tried but it wasn’t working well for our family.  So in the end we decided to send our 4 kids to an international school.

There were plenty of options in Chiang Mai - Grace, Chiang Mai International (CMIS), Prem, Lanna, American Pacific, Nakorn Phayap, Varee to name a few.  We liked the British curriculum option and considered Varee and Lanna at first.  However, our kids didn’t want to go to Varee and when we applied for Lanna our kids were not accepted.  That left us with the two traditional options for missionaries in Chiang Mai, Grace International and CMIS.

You ask the missionaries about where to send their kids between these two schools and you open a can of worms.  Some people are very passionate in advocating for Grace or CMIS.  Grace with almost 90% of the students being TCKs from missionaries families and a clear Christian mandate is definitely the more “Christian” school with predominately Christian teachers (who need to raise their own support to teach at the school) and overtly Christian events like chapel.  CMIS has only around 50% of TCKs from missionary families and less overtly Christian.  I would call it a church school rather than a Christian school.

Both are great schools.  I’m sure our kids would have been happy at both school but we had to make a choice.  In the end, we chose CMIS, because it would give us more contact with Thai families for whom we had come to Thailand.

Although being such an overtly Christian school and having a thoroughly Christian environment at Grace is conducive to a Christian child’s spiritual growth, I’ve heard that one of the issues can be what happens when they leave this “Christian bubble” and have to go to college where environment is completely opposed to their faith.  Some don’t cope well with this transition. 

So far we are happy with CMIS after half a year for our two older kids in grade 5 and 8, and after two weeks for our younger two in grade 3 and pre kindergarten.