Why I Wouldn’t Enroll My Child At Joji Ilagan Bian International School (Davao City): A Parent’s Honest Experience
The drizzle stuck to my car windows as I waited by the Joji Ilagan Bian International School gate last November, a warm pork siopao wrapped in paper tucked in my jacket pocket for my 13-year-old daughter Lila. I’d already waited 45 minutes; she’d texted me 20 minutes earlier saying she needed to leave early, but the admin hadn’t processed her exit pass yet. When she finally walked out, her uniform sweater was crumpled, her eyes puffy from crying, and she climbed into the backseat without saying hello or reaching for the siopao. That was the day I knew we’d made a mistake enrolling her there.
We moved to Davao from Cebu six months earlier, and Lila had always struggled with social anxiety. We were looking for a school that could offer smaller classes and dedicated mental health support, and JIB kept popping up in my social media feeds. Their website promised an international curriculum, a full-time on-campus guidance counselor, state-of-the-art STEM labs, and tuition marketed as “accessible for growing families.” It was still three times the cost of the local private high school down the road, but we stretched our budget, dipped into Lila’s college savings for the non-refundable enrollment deposit, and signed the enrollment papers.
The first red flag popped up in the first week of class: Lila’s science teacher never showed. Admin explained the teacher had a last-minute family emergency, and they’d hire a replacement within two weeks. For those two weeks, the kids were left in the classroom with a part-time security guard who sat at the front scrolling Facebook while they did whatever they wanted. When the new teacher finally arrived, she had no textbooks or lab materials. We’d already paid a 12,000 peso lab fee at the start of the semester, so I emailed admin to ask where the supplies were. They replied three days later saying the new lab building was still under construction, and we’d need to pay an additional 8,000 pesos per student to cover the cost of new equipment. I brushed it off at the time, telling myself growing pains were normal for a school expanding its campus.
The bigger issue came with the mental health support we’d been promised. We shared Lila’s anxiety diagnosis with the admissions team before enrolling, and they assured us their full-time guidance counselor met with students weekly and could accommodate modified schedules for high-energy events like pep rallies. Two months into the semester, Lila had a panic attack during the first school-wide pep rally. The nurse found her sitting on the floor of the bathroom, gave her a bottle of water, and left her in the waiting room outside admin to wait for the guidance counselor. No one called me. The guidance counselor didn’t get to the Davao campus until two hours later, when I was already pulling through the gate. Lila had to beg the receptionist to let her use a work phone to text me to come get her.
When I decided to pull her out after that, I asked for a partial refund of the remaining tuition we’d paid for the semester, plus the 5,000 peso field trip fee that had already been canceled when the school couldn’t secure buses for the trip. Admin told me all fees were non-refundable per the contract, and stopped replying to my emails. When I showed up to the admin office to ask for a meeting with the principal, I waited an hour and a half in the lobby before being told she was in a meeting and couldn’t see me. The second time I came, security wouldn’t let me past the lobby because I didn’t have a scheduled appointment, even after I showed them a dozen unanswered emails asking for that appointment.
I know a lot of parents here in Davao are in the same spot I was a year ago. We want the best for our kids, and “international school” marketing feels like a guarantee of a better education and better support, especially if your kid has extra needs. I made all the common mistakes busy parents make: I took the school’s marketing at face value, I only talked to the parent ambassadors they introduced me to at open house, I didn’t read the fine print of the contract. That’s on me, but it’s why I’m sharing this experience—so other parents don’t lose the kind of money we lost, and don’t put their kid through the stress Lila went through.
If you’re considering any private school in Davao, JIB included, do these three concrete things before you sign anything. First, ask to visit a regular class on a random, unannounced school day, not just the polished open house tour. If the school says no, walk away. When we enrolled, they only let us see the new, empty lab building and a prepped class for the tour. If I’d asked to sit in on a regular 7th grade class, I would have seen how overcrowded rooms were—they promised 25 kids per class, but every grade had 40 to 45. Second, ask for specific details about support staff, not generic claims. Don’t accept “we have a guidance counselor” as an answer. Ask how many students that counselor is responsible for, how many days a week they’re on campus, and get that information written down somewhere. Our “full-time” guidance counselor was shared between three JIB campuses across Mindanao, and only came to Davao once every two weeks. That’s not something they put on their website. Third, join a local Davao parent group that’s not run by the school, and ask for unfiltered feedback from current parents. Most parents will be honest with you privately about what’s actually going on, if you ask.
We pulled Lila out right before Christmas, and enrolled her at a small, independent school 10 minutes from our house. It doesn’t call itself international, it doesn’t have a big billboard on the highway, and tuition is half what we paid at JIB. Lila meets with her guidance counselor every Friday, her classes have 18 kids, and she hasn’t had a stomach ache before school in almost three months. We still haven’t gotten back the 80,000 pesos we lost in non-refundable fees, and that stings—it would have covered two years of contributions to her college fund. Every once in a while I see a new ad for JIB pop up on my feed, with smiling kids in crisp new uniforms, and I wonder how many other parents are going to end up in the same spot I was. It’s not that every experience at the school is bad; I know a couple of families who haven’t had major issues. But based on what we went through with our daughter, I wouldn’t recommend enrolling there, and I wish someone had told me what to check for before I signed the papers.
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