Further plans

I talked to one of the more experienced ALTs today about how the rehiring and placement process works for ALTs in Koshigaya, so now I'm a bit more informed on what my chances of hanging here another year are. I'll give a brief (yeah right) description of the whole thing incorporating what I learned today.

Each city has a Board of Education, which is responsible for the ALTs. The ALTs come from a few places: JET (government employees; used to be really huge I think but slowly dying because their salary is too high for BoE's to stomach), private companies (like mine), and exchange things that are similar to JET. I'm not really sure what happens with JET, but with private companies, they accept bids from various companies--"we can supply X ALTs for Y yen"--and basically take the lowest one, or lowest ones if they need more ALTs than one company can deliver at the moment.

Once a given company is told that their bid is good, they send any new ALTs along with a rep from the company to the Board of Education to let the higher-ups eyeball them, though I can't really see what they could determine just from looking at someone and talking to them through an interpreter. Anyway, technically they could refuse any ALTs, or the entire contract, based on this meeting, though from what I hear that rarely happens. If they like what they see, they officially sign the contract for the rest of the school year. This is what we did this semester, because this was Heart School's first contract in Koshigaya.

For people that have already been teaching in the city, they don't have to go through the interview process, but they're not guaranteed a job after a given school year. The BoE determines right after the final semester of a year whether they'll renew their old contracts or go for some combination of new companies and JETs. Their criteria for renewal are their opinion of the ALTs of a company and the price of their contract, in which order I don't know. If they got too many complaints about the ALTs of a company, they'll probably drop the contract unless it's ridiculously cheap.

So back to me: I said earlier that I was thinking of staying, but only if I could stay in the same schools that I have now, or at least roughly so (the elementaries might change a little since there's tons of those, but keeping the same middle school for sure). Up until today I wasn't really sure if there would be any way to request to stay at a school and know the result far enough in advance to not commit to staying there another year. I wouldn't want to make a decision to stay, put off any kind of America plans, then find out that I've been assigned to some totally different school system, possibly in a different city even. But since I also found out today that the break between school years is about 2 weeks (yes, I didn't mistype that), I decided that there's really no way for me to get stuck here in a school that I don't want. Here's how.

Right now, I'm in a "guest house", which is normally used for short-term living. It's cheap and you can walk out at any time without any real repercussions like you would get from breaking an apartment lease, which in Japan is about a thousand times worse than America. Since the period between my contract ending and the next school year starting is a matter of weeks, I can just renew my guest house lease another month and hang around to see whether
(a)my company gets their contract renewed, and
(b)I stay in the same city (99% chance), and
(c)the BoE puts me in my preferred schools.

If it turns out that I get different schools, which I should know within the first week of school, I can see "Sayounara" (probably the first time in history that a white person would be saying that in the correct context when leaving a company) and leave with no financial repercussions. I can then take a couple of weeks to do some sightseeing before heading back to America. I will tell both my company and the BoE that this is what I plan to do. Normally I wouldn't think placing ultimatums would be too great of an idea for someone with my tenuous job security to do, but since I'm perfectly happy leaving if I don't get the situation I want, I really don't care if it causes them to drop me. If they know in advance that I'll leave if I don't get my preference, then it's their own fault if they're stuck without an ALT when I walk out on them.

If, however, I DO get my schools again, I can leave the guest house after the month is up and get an apartment in this area and everything's dandy. I might even get a nicer bike!

So what this means is that I need to be totally sure that I'll stay if I do in fact get my schools again, since I think it would be pretty terrible to have them accept my terms only for me to walk out anyway. I figure I should decide by the beginning of the spring semester (actually trimester) whether or not this will be my course of action. I should definitely meet with one of the BoE people early in the semester to make sure they know well enough in advance that they can take my situation into account before making any final contract or placement decisions. I'll be sure to keep everyone updated on how that goes.

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Man that's a lot of words, and I didn't even get to a bunch of the stuff I wanted to. Well, stay tuned for the next few entries where I get advice from a guy teaching elementary school in America, and where a fight breaks out in my hallway and the cops come to sort it out.