1 month in...and our school is closing

Today we found out for definite that our school will be closing in the very near future. At the moment it seems that all of our elementary classes in the afternoons will stop from this Friday and then for December we will only teach Kinder. However we don't know for sure what will actually happen. Tomorrow the parents will be told that the school will be closing. I imagine several parents will take their kids out of the school immediately, so there's a chance there won't be any kids to teach in December.

There has been much talk amongst the teachers since we arrived of the problems to do with the school. For many months the Korean teachers have not been paid on time. The foreign teachers often were paid in installments. This month our Vice Principal didn't come into work for a week in protest against the lack of pay for the Korean teachers. 'The Boss' told the staff at school that she was at home due to family problems. Many of the teachers believed him. There are numerous cases of lies and rumours circulating around school.

None of us, including the Vice Principal, were expecting it when last Friday 'The Boss' said the school will most probably close the following week due to serious financial problems. This was the day before the talent show. Which explains why the sobs from the teachers grew louder when the Vice Principal said in her speech: 'We will make the school even better next year and try even harder.'

I'm really sad that this has happened, especially so suddenly. We've settled into the area, made our flats look nice, planned ahead at school and formed close bonds with the staff and students. To be honest, we're glad that today a final decision was made that the school will close, as if it was going to stay open, after everything that's happened, we'd be constantly worrying about how secure our jobs were. And it is better to happen after just a month rather than any longer amount of time.

So now we our job hunting again. There are positives to our school closing as we will hopefully be able to get an even better job! We are hoping to get somewhere in a better location (more central) and maybe less hours and more pay :) Our school are being very kind to us about the whole thing and feel terrible about it. They said we can go for interviews at any time and if a good job arises we can start that in December (when otherwise we'd still be working at our current school ). The school have already contacted immigration and job agencies for us. We have been promised that we can stay in our apartments until we start a new job, and that we will get paid. However, 'The Boss' suggested the owner is close to bankruptcy so I'm not convinced that these promises can be kept. This evening we met up with the lovely recruiter who found us this job. She said it's not that common for a hagwon to close like this, so we're just very unlucky...