Yu Ming, AIM, or Shu Ren
Hi, it's kindergarten decision season! We luckily got a spot at Yu Ming through random drawing, but we are also considering AIM and Shu Ren. Ignoring costs, if you have insights on these schools, why would you prefer one over the others?
Language is not a big differentiating factor here, since my kid's Chinese reading and writing are above grade level. I am especially interested in hearing your thoughts on whether kids with certain temperaments and/or learning differences would not work well with one or more of these schools.
Mar 7, 2024
Parent Replies
We went to AIM for part of preschool and transferred to GMIS which was such a warm and refreshing change from the rigidity of AIM. We are attending Shu Ren in elementary school and it has been a great expenrience so far for our different / sometimes difficult child. Please feel free to reach out and we are happy to share more.
We've been at Shu Ren for several years and are shifting our child to an English-language speaking school. I like but don't love the school and I'm rooting for it to succeed. If we were staying in Mandarin immersion, we would probably pick Shu Ren over Yu Ming mostly because we think the class sizes are smaller and we think the administration would be more flexible around high energy children who are less likely to followed structured situations. Yu Ming class sizes are a lot larger; the one class I witnessed at Yu Ming had a teacher using a headset microphone to communicate with all the students. Our friends who have kids there like it, but there are some situations where the lack of resources as a public school shows up. A friend of mine has had to teach a PE class here or there at Yu Ming.
At Shu Ren, the head of school is really dedicated and passionate; they do have some teacher turnover issues. I can't tell whether this is a function of being a Mandarin immersion school where the labor pool is inherently thinner than it would be for an English language school. The warmness and quality of the teachers has been somewhat uneven, we had great teachers the first two years and the one in the most recent year hasn't really clicked with our child. Had they had a great teacher in the most recent year, maybe we would've continued for at least another year or sevearl. That said, we've seen our child use some conversational Mandarin (we are a non-speaking household) so that has been pretty cool. We are definitely looking for ways to continue our child's Mandarin education outside of school going forward.
We've really enjoyed the parent community at Shu Ren. Most of the parents I've met are really humble, hard-working and dedicated to their kids.