Panama Snow Days

Starting as a new student anywhere is difficult, but starting as a new student in a foreign country is another level. It’s hard to tell who was more nervous for day 1, me or my daughters. Through the move, I have tried to protect them as much as I can by making everything easy for them.

Don’t get me wrong, the move was still incredibly hard on them, but I tried to facilitate every desire they had for anything leading up to the move. You want a pool day with friends every week? Great, let’s get our suits on! Sleepovers? Duh! You can stay up until 5am. You need airpods for the plane ride…(That one got a side-eye and I knew I was being hustled) but ultimately she got the damn airpods.

But school.

School is something they had to do on their own. Which I know, because I tried to volunteer at the school but COVID restrictions didn’t allow anyone who was not a student or staff. So there was no more protecting them here. 

The school here is not what we are used to in the states. For starters, it doesn’t look like a school building. That’s because it isn’t. It’s a house that was purchased and converted into a school then added onto several times. From the outside it looks small, but the school has 260+ students, which is impressive based on the perceived size of the building.

Another unusual thing about this school is that because of the number of students and the COVID requirement for social distancing, primary ages (K-6) go in the morning and secondary (7-12) go in the afternoon. For me as a parent of both a primary and a secondary student, that is a lot of drop offs and pick-ups, and of course no buses here. Not the most convenient thing for a parent, but I wasn’t cut out to be a homeschool teacher, so I gladly listen to Harry Styles or The Aubreys for the 15 minute drive to school with each of them. 

Another unusual thing about the school here are the reasons why school is sometimes closed. In Idaho we would have a “snow-day”. This is when it snows like crazy the night before and the busses can’t get through because the roads are too slick, so the kids get to miss school and have a snow day! Snow days are literally the best days for kids in Idaho. This is going to shock you, but there is no snow in Panama, so no snow days. But! We have “Panama Snow Days” (this name is only what my family calls it, this is not what the school says).

There are days when I take Madeline to school in the morning, roll up and get ready to kick her out of the car, and a teacher comes to the car window and says “We don’t have any water to the building and won’t all day. Sorry. Pick some up on your way home if you don’t have any either.” Or I drop Mailee off in the afternoon and an hour later get a message from the school “Our breaker box popped and we can’t get a technician out here for 2 days. Please come get your child and no school tomorrow either.”

So those days we have a Panama Snow Day.

The last big difference in the school is what’s taught at the school. Overall, I have been pleased with the type of education both girls are getting here. Madeline is working on multiplication in the second grade, which I feel like doesn’t happen until third in the states. Mailee was pushed up a grade because at home she was in the gifted and talented accelerated program. I am not sure that Mailee is as challenged as she was back in Idaho, but she is a hard kid to challenge because she’s so smart. They are, however, learning things that I don’t remember learning in school.

There is much more of a focus on World History and World Geography and cultural differences. The students at the school are from around the world. Mailee’s best friends are from South Africa, Nova Scotia, and Toronto. Madeline’s best friends are South African and Panamanian. Because there is such a wide range of students and backgrounds, they can’t focus on one single country. I love this aspect of the school. I had no idea how many countries there are in Africa. Now I know there are 54, and Mailee knows where each of them are. I wasn’t entirely sure what Carnaval was celebrating or how to celebrate it. But Madeline made a Carnival mask and taught our family what it is celebrating. 

One of the big reasons we chose Panama was the cost of the international schools. In other countries, if you aren’t a citizen you cannot attend public school and the price of international school can be tens of thousands of dollars per semester. In Panama there is a wide range of tuition, but even with that range it is a much more reasonable price.

We moved here to give our kids a different perspective on life and what’s important, but I thought the move itself would be facilitating this discovery. I enrolled them in school so that their brains didn’t rot and they could still get a US diploma and stay on track. I think what school here has actually done is show them how accessible the world is and that each different part of the world can be cool and important. It is making them understand how all the pieces fit together from a macro perspective.

Is it going to change their path entirely? I have no idea, but it’s been really fun to learn with them as they share at the dinner table and of course enjoy the surprise Panama Snow Day.