#Thread

1/ We have education choices!

Private education is too expensive globally.

Private education in Kenya has no value for money when compared to other options. And now we are free to explore new options.

2/ The best thing #COVID19KE has shown our family is the private school our kids were attending pre-COVID19 was not offering value for money. 5th grade, we were paying around 800,000ksh a year and for 8th grade, we were paying 900,000 a year. There are about 90 students per grade

3/ When COVID19 closed schools they gave families (without consultation) a 20% and 25% discount to move to virtual classrooms. They said it was the biggest discount they could offer because they were a non-profit and 70% of their fees went for staff and teacher salaries.

4/ Yet in a meeting last week with their CEO I was told sadly because they paid teachers so poorly they couldn't afford to reduce the fees anymore. The CEO sited an Ass. Teacher getting 18,500ksh & an IB Biology Teacher who earns 54,000ksh. I did the math. Where is the $ going?

5/ We realized we had fallen into the typical middle-class, upper-middle-class Kenyan dilemma - our kids must be in the "right" school, or else they will not "make" it. That we had no other choice but to do everything we could do to pay for a school we could not afford.

6/ I am calling BS to it. And in three months of research, I have realized that we do have other choices & they are global choices. Our kids are going to be doing virtual learning for the forthcoming year / years. So I started to explore what else was out there and what they cost

7/ I found American, Canadian, European & Australian curriculum options offering degrees (and even college credit in HS) & quality education online for a fraction of the cost of a Kenyan private school. The curriculum has been specifically designed and tested. It is evaluated.

8/ It is not the fly by the seat of our pants to offer something so the money keeps flowing emergency education that our school kept trying to sell to us was still the same quality education that they had convinced us they were offering in pre-COVID19 times.

9/ We have decided on an American curriculum which is a 1/4 of the cost. Everyone will say, but what about the social skills the kids will be missing out on & to that I answer, we will be intentional and the girls will get social interaction when it is safe.

10/ They are also starting to say what else non-school related they are keen on learning about and we are now investigating together how they can learn other things. For the first time, they are active participants in what and how they can learn. This is what education should be.

11/ I have found there are now many other families in Nairobi who even before COVID19 realized they were not getting value for money & their kids were in schools that were destroying them (ie bullying). And kids were not actually learning just getting grades and passing.

12/ Do the Kenyan private schools actually care if the kids learn? Or are they in business only to make money?

Have the students only become commodities? https://www.standardmedia.co.ke/article/2000187805/is-fee-charged-by-kenyan-private-schools-worth-it

13/ I was told that research by the Private School Association of Kenya that if government support is not given to the private school by the end of August 50% of them will be bankrupt and closed.

This is why our former school believes that they will be able to keep open even...

14/ if their current parents can not pay and have to leave the school because there will be other parents out there who will not have a school open and who will still be able to pay. They are counting on being able to pick those parents up.

END/ Their calculation is risky given the global economic collapse & the impact on all of us. Schools are not opening in September. I hope more parents will do the research & not feel pressured to pay for something, in the long run, is just not a good investment. You have OPTIONS