Yinghua International School

We withdrew our daughter from Ying Hua 3 months into the school year. It cost us 100% of the remaining tuition, as well as the enrollment fee and tuition at her new school. It was worth every cent. She is now finally happy to be going to school.
We enrolled her at YH for the language. She had a very kind teacher there for Pre-S. We never liked the ethos of the school, but stuck it out for the good teacher and the language.
In Pre-K, we didn't feel the same warmth & commitment from the teachers. Sure enough, we received an email in November: “our Pre-K class will face a transition that embodies both challenges and opportunities. [Their head teacher] has decided to make a career change and accepted another job offer.” The teacher left the following week. As she told me, she got “a job with a different company.”
Too often we felt as if we were in a corporation rather than a place of learning. Clearly at least some of the teachers are driven not by a commitment to their students but their own career ambitions.
The school and its administrators are pre-occupied with marketing and financial growth, sending advertising materials home in the students’ backpacks for parents to distribute. Chinese is touted as something children should learn to become business leaders in the global market place.
Of the 4 women who run the school, one has training in education. The others have degrees in engineering, marketing, psychology, business, and economics. This is felt throughout the school.
The director, for example, has degrees in engineering, no background in education, doesn't speak Chinese, and, before we had informed the school we were leaving, was consistently cold, patronizing, and dismissive, rarely speaking or making eye contact. From what I saw, she was no warmer with the children. At our final meeting she told us rudely she didn’t want to “have to track down this money.”
Most tellingly, for one year and 3 months, our daughter never once looked forward to attending YH, saying quietly each morning, “I don’t want to go to Ying Hua.” After a single day at her new Quaker school, she said, “I love this school! Am I ever going back to Ying Hua?” We told her no. “Yay!” was her answer.
If we'd kept her longer at YH, she’d have learned Chinese. But given her negative associations with the school, she probably never would have wanted to speak it when she got older.