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Teachers Hired By BC-Certified School Face Expulsion from South Korea

Overseas school passed two BC education ministry inspections, despite licence irregularities.

Katie Hyslop 28 Apr 2017TheTyee.ca

Katie Hyslop is The Tyee’s education and youth reporter. Find her previous stories here.

This report is part of The Tyee’s reader-funded B.C. 2017 election coverage. To learn more about becoming a Tyee Builder, go here.

The B.C. government’s experiment in going global with its educational brand has hit big problems in South Korea, where 14 teachers from a B.C.-certified school have two weeks to leave the country.

The South Korean government says the Canada-BC International School (CBIS) doesn’t have the proper licence and the teachers, hired to deliver the British Columbia curriculum to Korean students, were given the wrong kind of visas by the school.

And four other B.C.-certified schools in South Korea could be in the same situation, teachers say.

Teacher Kristen Hendricks described being detained and interrogated by Korean immigration officials earlier this month.

Hendricks said she was not allowed to have a lawyer or school representative present during two-and-a-half hours of questioning. She and the school principal both falsely confessed to knowingly obtaining a visa for fraudulent purposes to end the interrogation, she said. She was unaware at the time they had also agreed to a one-year ban on re-entering South Korea.

“They said ‘If you don’t say it, we’re going to detain all the other teachers at your school,” she said in a video of an April 14 Skype call between the teachers and B.C. education ministry officials. “Now I am a criminal because of something that I didn’t do wrong.”

Every teacher was still brought to the Seoul Immigration Office for questioning the following day, teacher Margaret Hwu told The Tyee from Seoul.

None of the 14 teachers, 12 of whom are Canadian, speak or read Korean. When they asked immigration officials to fax documents to the Canadian Embassy for review and contact their lawyers, they were threatened with arrest and detention, Hwu claims.

Some teachers allege the two CBIS representatives who accompanied teachers to the immigration offices to provide “simple translation” also advised them to sign.

Eventually every teacher signed a document admitting their guilt. Now they have all received orders to leave the country before May 11 or face deportation.

“The worst of it is that there is a stamp that’s going to be on our passports and it may affect the ability to get visas to work in other countries, which is what many teachers were planning to do anyway before all of this,” said Hwu.

Since they signed a confession, immigration lawyers and Canadian Embassy officials say there is little hope the teachers can stay in the country.

“We have to follow that order,” she said. They cannot afford the approximately $50,000 Canadian to hire an immigration lawyer, leaving the teachers feeling alone navigating a complicated immigration system in a language they don’t speak.

Teacher Alexander Hebb said he and the other teachers didn’t know they had the wrong visa when they were hired to teach the full B.C. curriculum in South Korea.

They were supposed to have visas for professional teachers working at registered international schools.

Instead, their visas only allowed them to work legally at Korean “hagwons,” or cram schools, a problem the B.C. education ministry acknowledged in its 2012 inspection report on the school.

The Korean government certification “states that the School’s objectives are Foreign Language, Music and Art Program,” the report said.

But the local government issued the licence knowing the school was “teaching the full B.C. Program in English to Korean students,” the provincial government acknowledged. “It therefore appears that the local government has decided to licence the School as a ‘Hagwon’ or ‘special, private or language school,’ but that the local government and education authorities are aware of the nature and requirements of the BC Offshore School Program being delivered at the School,” the report says.

Hebb said teachers learned the problem was widespread when they sought help from the Canadian embassy in South Korea. “They told us that they have been trying to discourage the opening of Canadian offshore schools in South Korea since 2013,” he wrote.

“Yet the BC Ministry of Education continues to promote employment opportunities here without telling teachers of this legal “grey zone” and has always been aware of the E2 visa issues,” Hebb wrote. The teachers say they were hired at CBIS after responding to job ads on the B.C. government’s Make a Future website.

In an emailed statement sent to The Tyee, Global Affairs Canada spokesperson Natasha Nystrom said the federal government is aware of the teachers’ situation in Seoul, but there isn’t anything they can do.

“Consular officials cannot intercede with foreign immigration officials to allow a Canadian citizen to enter or exit a country,” Nystrom wrote. “It is the sole prerogative of every country or territory to determine who is allowed to enter or exit.”

Nystrom provided a link to Global Affairs’ webpage dedicated to Canadians considering teaching in South Korea. The section on visas warns potential teachers that “visa regulations and document requirements change quite frequently,” and the penalties for using fraudulent documents include deportation and restrictions on re-entry for at least five years.

In the video of the Skype meeting, Brian Jonker, executive director of international education for the B.C. ministry, informs the teachers that despite two inspections of the school in the last eight months, including a surprise inspection in early April, B.C. only recently discovered the school’s owner cancelled their licence last year.

Jonker added all five B.C.-certified schools in the country have been licensed as hagwons, but CBIS is the only school in this situation. The ministry believes the rest are safe because unlike CBIS, the other four schools are still licensed.

B.C.’s education ministry has certified a total of 46 offshore schools, the majority in China, in a program that brings in about $4.9 million a year. Each school pays $15,000 annually to the education ministry and $350 per student. As of 2015/16 there were 12,000 students enrolled in B.C.’s offshore schools.

“We are on this end still working with the folks we have on the ground in Korea, as well as the ownership group to try to look for a speedy resolution where possible,” Jonker told the teachers. However, when teachers asked about who would cover their pay for the rest of the school year, flight allowance, and health insurance —which has been cancelled — Jonker said that was the responsibility of their employer, not the ministry.

“We are in no way able to make commitments about financial contributions to you,” he said.

“The ownership has never cared about us before,” teacher Faustus Salvador said to Jonker. “We trusted them when we were hired, and we are now in this criminal position because of that trust.”

Two weeks after the teachers raised the situation, the ministry released a statement on its own offshore schools webpage saying it had negotiated with the school’s owner to secure teachers’ pay up to the end of June and the cost of accommodations and departure flights.

In an email to The Tyee, the teachers took issue with several facts in the ministry’s statement, including the characterization of the departure orders as “immigration deportation orders” and blaming the crisis on the lapse of the school’s licence.

“We were teaching BC curriculum under an E2 visa, which is considered illegal by the Korean government,” read the joint email from the 14 teachers, adding they are still concerned other B.C. offshore schools will be impacted as their teachers also have the same visas.

They also said conversations with their former principal, Lowell Jackie, have indicated their former employer has yet to agree to cover pay until the end of June and other costs. Another Skype meeting with the ministry is scheduled for this weekend.

The Tyee contacted the education ministry but was told that because of the election no one would be available to comment.

Last fall’s B.C. inspection of the school outlined issues including the lack of a principal since March 2016. Teachers shared principal duties until the new principal arrived in January 2017.

In the video, teachers say the most recent surprise inspection at the beginning of April was sparked by a complaint from a parent to the B.C. government about the new administration. While the inspection was under way, one CBIS teacher returning to South Korea from spring break was detained by immigration officials at the airport. The teacher was told to report to immigration officials in Seoul later that week.

But B.C. inspector Doug Lauson, who is also board president of the Federation of Independent School Associations of BC, and school officials told the teachers not to worry.

“Apparently they looked into it and communicated with the immigration office multiple times,” Hwu said. “The message that was given to all of us as teachers was that we didn’t need to worry about it, [the teacher] didn’t need to worry about going, everything was going to be OK and there was no issue with our immigration.”

Less than two weeks later all the teachers were interrogated by immigration officials and intimidated into signing false confessions, Hwu said. Lauson did not respond to The Tyee’s interview requests.

B.C. has put the school’s certification on probation. Teachers claim the school has now been shut down by Korean immigration officials, and they are all out of jobs and running out of money.

But more than their employment is in question. The teachers, some of whom say they have been in the country for five years, have been banned from South Korea for one year and face a permanent mark on their visas, making it more difficult to obtain future work visas for any country.

Physical education and technology teacher Robert Flower spoke in the video about spending his entire adult life studying and working in South Korea. He has a Korean fiancée. *

“Last night I had to explain to her that I have been kicked out of her country and cannot live abroad, and that we have to find a solution or else we can’t be together,” he said, choking up. “When I went to immigration, they did not even give me the basic right of having a lawyer, all because I tried to teach the B.C. curriculum.”

Students are also affected, and Hwu says the teachers are concerned the students will go to other B.C.-certified schools, only to face the same issues.

“It really is a very negative experience that they’re having with the B.C. system,” she said.

Students who graduate from B.C.-certified schools earn a British Columbia high school diploma, which helps them access North American schools.

B.C.-certified schools act as feeders bringing international students into the province’s secondary and post-secondary systems, where they pay higher tuition fees than domestic students. International education was the province’s third largest export in 2015, bringing in $2 billion that year.

The former CBIS teachers are not represented by the BC Teachers’ Federation. However, federation president Glen Hansman says this is just another example that B.C.’s offshore schools program is not working.

“We think there needs to be a review of the entire concept,” Hansman said.

“Why are we pursuing this? We’re proud of our curriculum and the work that we do in British Columbia schools. But this is a very curious form of revenue generation for the province, and if the province of British Columbia’s stamp is going to be on it, we need to make sure that people aren’t being put at risk.”

The teachers believe it’s too late for them to stay in South Korea, much less find another job elsewhere for September. Now they say they’re fighting for teachers and students — current and future — at B.C. certified schools.

“We really hope that some actions can be taken to reform the current situation with offshore schools. There has to be better protection for students, parents, and teachers in Korea,” Hwu said.

“We want the other educators, especially those working at these schools right now to be informed, and for those teachers who are planning to maybe come here for September.”

*Name corrected April 28 at 5:50 p.m.  [Tyee]

Read more: Education, BC Politics

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