Sarasas Schools

[MrLaoKao]

Hi,

Does anybody know the Sarasas schools? Is it ok to send kids there?

/MrLaoKao

[BEVUP]

Looked alitle bit into this myself

Went to a private thai school to check out

New the admin woman & was speaking perfect english

Ok a thai school but teaches some english with fees of 37000 bht per term + insurance + extras

They do class work & activities along with excursions

That is where th diference is

Heard they biult a new one in the area & would cost half the price

From what i was told by the admin lady of thai private school, it is because they only do book work in a classroom nothing else

[Smee]

Our experience with Sarasas Witaed Romklao has been appalling. Short list of grievances, and these are only some of the issues we have had to deal with over 6 years: they don't allow parents anywhere near the classrooms or the teachers.In 6 years, we have been allowed onto the campus just 4 times, once to see a 3 minute play performed by the class (then we were chivvied out rapidly), once to meet a teacher that claimed she wanted to help our son do better at school but actually just wanted us to pay to "fix" the boys poor exam results so he could continue "studying" at the school (she spoke no English, of course).

My wife was called to the campus on two other occasions, once for a sports event and another time to meet teachers regarding poor performance, low grades and "discipline" issues. On each occasion, not one single Thai teacher we met at this so-called “Bi-lingual” school spoke any English at all. Teaching English is left to "native" English speakers, many of whom you might see (and avoid) drinking on the streets and in cheap bars of an evening.

Certainly that has been our experience.

We once met a sweaty, disheveled, drunken Brit at a bar one weekend who volunteered that he taught English at the school to children of our son's age and then when asked if he knew or son he became very defensive and told us that he teaches "over 700 kids a day in many different classes and I don't know any of their names and they don’t know our names either.". He also failed to impart any knowledge of English to our son either.

Subsequently, this fellow got into a drunken bar brawl with a couple of other patrons, someof who were also Sarasas English teachers.

Our son returned home with a broken arm in a crude cast one day - broken while playing football at a school activity. No letter from the school. no explanation, no phone call, despite me sending letters and calling up trying to find out what happened and why no one thought it appropriate to communicate with the boy's parents.

Sarasas doesn't do communication.

On another occasion, the boy came home with an absurd military-style haircut We discovered that Sarasas accepts money from a training program for barbers/hairdressers to supply heads of hair - our children - for these students from outside the school to practice on. Of course, parents are not consulted or asked of they are willling to allow their kids to be used guinea pigs while someone pockets a fee for turing our children into laughing stocks.

As I say, Sarasas doesn't do communication.

So no response to that written and telephoned complaint either.

Mostc recently the boy's cell phone was taken from him, he claimed because he was "late" (my fault, not his), and so missed the time by which it is required to turn over a cell phone to the teacher. Accordingly we couldn't communicate with him where and when to meet him at the end of the school day. 45 minutes spent in the front office tracking the boy down, then finding the teacher to get the phone back, only to find that we were waylaid before we got to the classroom by a gaggle of Thai teachers, not one of whom spoke one word of English, and none of whom could offer any explanation as to why the phone was taken in the first place, or why it was not returned to him to call his parents to arrange his collection at the end of the school day.

Then a short, angry little man arrived, who I subsequently identified as a "coordinator" (and who it later transpired, unsurprisingly, is universally loathed by the students).

He ignored me and immediately started screaming at our son, wagging his finger in his face and spitting with rage, backed up by several other male teachers who surrounded my son in a menacing phalanx. This went on for almost two minutes before I stepped in and told him to stop shouting at the boy and tell me, his father, what was going on. Instead, he started wagging his finger and shouting at ME! I don't suppose he was expecting me to shout back, but of course I did, louder, longer and more pointedly than him and within 20 seconds, clearly intimidated and unused to anyone standing up to his vile diatribes, he ran away screaming he was going to call the police. I returned to the front office
and demanded to know who this vile little man was, and why he thought it in any way appropriate to start shouting at my son in front of me and then to start on me and then to threaten me with the police. After a while, he was duly summoned and appeared, continued shouting at me before his colleagues insisted that he stop shouting and start acting reasonably as the children outside the office were getting scared. He finally offered the most insincere apology I have ever witnessed through gritted teeth and stormed off.

The following day, our son was called to the head teacher and forced to sign a letter binding him to leave the school and never return after the end of term - because, get this, his father shouted at a staff member!!! Needes to say, we were not infomred of this before, during or after the event.

Sarasas doesn't do communication.

Sarasas Witaed Romklao does not accept checks, credit or debit cards, bank transfers or any other financial instrument other than cash. It does not issue tax receipts. This could easily lead one to suspect that it is fiddling billions in undeclared income from the Thai government.

Its modus operandi includes accepting all-comers in age groups below 15, giving them risible academic support and then, at 15 years old or so, when the exam results start to really matter, expelling or refusing to accept under-performing students... so the senior years are greatly diminished and populated only by the rlatively few students that are likely to achieve good grades, thereby creating the illusion that the school's graduation records and grades are significantly higher than the national average.

This contrived "fact: is what persuaded my wife that a education at Sarasas was worth the misery and confusion it inflicted on parents and students alike. We know better now, but far too late to salvage our son's academic aspirations.

In case you might be thinking that our boy is somehow unique in this respect, the sad truth is that the vast majority of his former classmate/friends have already been taken out of the school and placed elsewhere by their parents, among them police and army generals and some extremely wealthy Thai business persons who all started off with teh same mistaken assumption that Sarasas is an icon of academic excellence but finally saw what was going on and were able, financially, to act accordingly and could afford to get their kids into proper schools such as La Salle or an International school.

UInfiortunately, we are not as wealthy as some of his friends parents, and our son’s academic career has been cynically and progressively compromised by the unprofessional, uncaring, over-bearing, abusive, uncommunicative and utterly unacceptable actuations of Sarasas Witaed Romklao school and its so-called “teachers”.

So, avoid Sarasas Witaed Romklao at all costs.

I can't speak for other Sarasas schools, of course, but if the comments of large numbers English teachers on various blog posts, easily found on the internet, are anything to go by, Sarasas Witaed Romklao, which as demonstrated above is an utter, utter disgrace, is hardly likely to be the only totally worthless school in the chain.

Edited February 28, 2013 by Smee