Why I Wouldn’t Enroll My Child At Joji Ilagan Bian International School In Davao City: A Parent’s Honest Experience
I’m standing under a gnarled mango tree outside the school gate, a melting halo-halo with extra ube in one hand, trying not to step on the squishy fallen fruit that’s dotted the sidewalk. It’s the Tuesday after first quarter midterms, 32 degrees even with the light post-rain humidity, and I’m waiting for my 13-year-old daughter Lila, who I’d pulled out of bed that morning with promises of her favorite after-school treat if she just got through the day.
She comes out 10 minutes after the final bell, her school lanyard twisted around her wrist, a half-drunk sago’t gulap sticking out of the side of her unzipped backpack, and she doesn’t even mention the halo-halo. She just slumps into the passenger seat of our car, crosses her arms, and says, “I don’t want to go back tomorrow.”
We’d enrolled Lila there three months earlier, after she finished 7th grade at a large public school where she’d gotten lost in a class of 52 kids. She’s always been slow to warm up, hates raising her hand even when she knows the answer, and we’d seen Joji Ilagan Bian’s billboards along Diversion Road advertising small class sizes, international curriculum, and personalized student support. It was a stretch for us—tuition ran close to 180,000 pesos a year, so my husband cut out his weekly golf round, I took on extra freelance writing work to cover the cost, and we dipped into Lila’s college fund for the non-refundable down payment. We told ourselves it was an investment in her confidence, that the smaller school would be better for her anxiety.
The first red flags were small, easy to brush off as new-school growing pains. Lila’s homeroom teacher couldn’t remember her name for the first three days. When Lila forgot her asthma inhaler on a Wednesday in September, I called the front office at 10 a.m. to ask someone to walk it to her, and no one called me back until 3 p.m., after classes let out. The office manager apologized later, saying all the admin staff had been at a school event and no one had stayed back to cover the phone. I brushed it off as a one-off mistake.
The group project was what broke it. Lila’s social studies class was assigned a project on Davao’s Lumad communities, and Lila ended up in a group with two boys who never showed up to after-class planning meetings. She spent 15 hours over two weeks building a website, interviewing a family friend who works with indigenous communities for sources, and making the presentation slides. The boys only showed up the day of the presentation, and stumbled through their two-minute parts. When Lila stayed after class to tell the teacher what had happened, she just shrugged and said, “Collaboration is part of the grade. If you didn’t hold your group accountable, that’s on you.” The whole group got a C. Lila cried in the bathroom for an hour after class, and that was the day I picked her up with the melting halo-halo.
I requested a meeting with the principal a few days later. She was 20 minutes late, checked her phone three times during our 25-minute conversation, and kept repeating that the school’s “international framework prioritizes student autonomy over hand-holding.” When I pointed out that they’d advertised a 15:1 student-teacher ratio, but Lila’s class had 27 students, she said demand had been higher than expected, and they’d add a new section the following school year. After the meeting, the only guidance counselor pulled me aside quietly and told me she’s the only full-time guidance staff for the entire 450-student high school. She doesn’t have time to check in on more than the most urgent cases.
That’s when I realized we’d bought into a brand, not an actual education experience. A lot of the “international” schools popping up around Davao put all their money into marketing and nice campus photos, and cut corners on the staff and support that actually make a difference for kids. I don’t say this to rant—I say this because I know how it feels to be a parent desperate to give your kid a better experience than you had, willing to sacrifice to make that happen. I wish someone had told me what I’m telling other parents now:
First, after you take the admin-led tour of any school, hang around the gate for 15 minutes after classes let out. Stop any random parent waiting for their kid and ask them what their biggest complaint about the school is. Admin will always introduce you to the parents who love the school, but random parents will tell you the truth about understaffing or unreturned emails. Second, don’t accept the “target” student-teacher ratio they put on the website. Ask for the actual current number of students in the exact grade your child will be enrolled in, right now. Third, if your kid needs any kind of extra support—anxiety, asthma, learning differences—ask specifically how many students each support staff member is currently responsible for. Don’t settle for a vague answer about “student well-being.”
We pulled Lila out after that first quarter, and enrolled her in a small local private school in Buhangin that’s been around for 25 years, for a third of the tuition. Her current class has 17 students, her teacher knows Lila doesn’t like raising her hand, so she asks Lila to write down her answers first before calling on her. When Lila had a group project last month, the teacher checked in with each group halfway through the project to make sure everyone was pulling their weight, and split the group when it became clear one kid wasn’t contributing.
We still can’t get back the 80,000 peso non-refundable down payment we paid to Joji Ilagan Bian. That money was supposed to buy Lila a new laptop for high school, and it still irks me every time I see that billboard along Diversion Road. Lila still has bad days where she doesn’t want to go to school, but those are just normal 13-year-old bad days, not days where she’s overwhelmed and invisible in a crowded class that the school never bothered to split. I don’t have any big neat conclusion here—we learned a hard, expensive lesson, and I just want other parents looking for schools in Davao to avoid the same mistake. We’re doing okay now, but it was a much rockier road than we ever expected when we signed that enrollment contract.
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