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[quote=Anonymous]Not so much a disadvantage exactly, but the whole bilingual aspect to the school culture can make doing even simple things very complicated.  Maybe not so much for YY, where probably few parents speak Chinese, but at a place like LAMB, Oyster or Stokes, where the school itself is trying to make itself a bilingual/trilingual community, it's just a lot of work.

For example, everything has to be translated -- so if you want to do a simple flyer about a potluck, you'd have to have it translated into other languages than English.  Sure you can just post it in English, but bleh, that's not really the spirit of the place, so you wait and wait to try to get someone to translate.  Also, meetings take twice as long (or you get 50% less done) so your PTA will be harder to organize, or anything else for that matter.  Your teachers may be native speakers of the other language, and there may be cultural differences between you and the teachers, or even communication problems.  For example, they may not be comfortable writing in English, so you might not be able to use email efficiently to communicate with them.  That's really hard if you have a busy work life and can't pick up and drop off in person.  Also, sometimes culturally the rah-rah PTA type A mom stuff just doesn't really go over that well.  That's nice on the one hand that you can take a break, but on the other hand, let's face it, it's rah rah type A moms who get stuff done.  So projects move slower, parental buy-in takes longer.

There are plenty of work-arounds for these things and in fact, I found the school culture to be surprisingly interesting and good for our family.  I came in as a type a rah rah mom and left as something different, despite myself.  My child really gained a wonderful world perspective from the experience.  [/quote]

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