Hi Teachers,
There will be some Holidays coming up like Chuseok and Korean New Years. If you are planning to go outside of Korea. You will be Quarantined when you return. If you are quarantined, you will be using your sick days. (You have 15 days sick leave)
Schools may ask you to not go outside Korea because of the Quarantine week. Because you are leaving outside of Korea, schools will be missing an English teacher for that time being.
Jon Pak
Program Coordinator
There's a thread on this policy on Dave's ESL Cafe as well.
I'm not sure how long the quarantine week has been in place since for public school teachers, but we've seen similar measures since spring, when a big chain of hagwon tried to take away passports and a local university announced its own quarantine policy, apparently coming from the Ministry of Education. But I wonder how effective it would be now. With roughly 10,000 cases in South Korea, and swine flu popping up in schools all over the place, seems you're at as great a risk in the country than out. Especially if it's only the foreign teachers being checked out and quarantined when they return from abroad, as I've heard from a number of people.
As I stated in a comment to Chris' post, we have to ask if schools are prepared to fire teachers for catching swine flu. It's happened before, and certainly if districts are doing what SMOE's doing, would teachers be punished for swine flu in a roundabout way by being disciplined for disobeying orders?
A month after letting 100 teachers go days before they were supposed to fly to Korea, the hits just keep on coming for SMOE. Still no comment on that issue from SMOE, by the way.
16 comments:
Actually, this may vary between schools. I booked a trip to Japan for Chuseok before this swine flu nonsense.
I was given a choice. Take the trip and take a week of "unpaid adminstrative leave" or cancel the trip and travel in Korea. I need the cash, so I canceled. It was made very clear that the bosses didn't want me to take the week off. Actually, it was a good excuse to get out of taking the GF overseas for Chuseok. I'm short on cash this year.
So...if you go home (after November) just get a vaccination, and a sheet of paper saying so. (Or just leave the country and don't tell anyone from your school about your travel plans.)
If SMOE wants to be a bunch of cunts then shame on them, but they can probably be outfoxed easily. These are the same people who didn't notice that they hired a few hundred people that they didn't need. Besides the immigration folks at the airport probably have better things to do than call up individual schools asking to see if people have been quarentined.
But this hysteria over swine flu is getting annoying. The Jinju lantern festival being cancelled is incredibly disspointing since I planned my Wedding to happen at about the same time and promised my family to have a nice time of looking at glowing things in a river.
Again, this is Korea basically saying that this global problem is just a foreign problem. If the ministry has no intention of honoring its signed contracts, they should just say so on the damn piece of paper!
Funny that only foreign teachers who have been overseas get quarantined, and not Koreans that have gone overseas.
Because everyone in Korea knows that all foreigners are dirty, disease ridden infestations, and there is no way a Korean could be infected while traveling...
Damn all those foreigners for spreading their infectious foreign germs here!
My {Korean) father in law's restaurant business in Daegu is not going so well at the moment because of all the damned overblown swine flu concerns.
And it's almost like the internet foresaw my what I was going to write, and gave me a capcha with a word that sums up my entire feelings on this damned swine flu hysteria: "guspork". Yes, it means absolutely nothing.
Go abroad and forced to take a week of sick days off when I get back? Sounds like a deal to me. Paid vacation after my paid vacation. Count me in.
Now had they said the quarantine period comes out of my VACATION days, they would have a fight on their hands, and a complain lodged with the Labor Board who won't brook that sort of nonsense.
It's all moot anyway: (1) my school doesn't give a shit where we go and has never implemented any sort of quarantine period for traveling teachers, and (2) even if they did, I wouldn't tell them my travel plans anyway, and leave regardless.
In Gwangju, EPIK teachers have been advised that we're not going to be forced to do quarantine if we leave for Chuseok, but if we do come back with swine flu, we will have to live with bringing down the wrath of the media on our colleagues across Korea. I think it's a reasonable point to make - it's pretty selfish to insist on making a three day trip somewhere when you are putting everyone else's sanity (and probably their freedom to travel) at risk. The fact that we are increasingly likely to catch it here doesn't really change how much hell we would collectively catch if one of Those Unqualified Foreign Teachers brings swine flu back (or is in a position to be blamed for a coincidental outbreak).
(Good call on the vaccination idea, though. That should be enough for any but the most paranoid bureaucrat.)
Informative info. Thanks Brian.
You're right. Surely we have more of a chance of getting piggy sniffles whilst at these schools than anywhere else.
The elementary school I'm at now has been checking the kids' temperatures with a thermometer in their ear. Now I'm no medical expert, but shouldn't the teacher have been cleaning the tip with alcohol before checking the next kid?
Sick days? I was supposed to get sick days during the last two years? Damn, I really should've read my contract more carefully.
1. I'm with ROK Hound: a vacation followed by enforced rest (using sick days I'd never use anyway) is at least worth considering.
2. Where's Kushibo to tell us some Western nation quarantined someone in the 8th century A.D. so we have no right to bitch about Korea's insane pig flu paranoia?
bingbing, I've read in many of the comments here and on other blogs about the ear thermometers that don't get changed between students, but hadn't seen it myself until I was watching KBS Wednesday night. It was a news thing about checking for flu at a local school and yep, right down the line of middle school students without cleaning or changing the tip. That wasn't the focus of the report, of course, but . . . damn.
I wonder how long before a foreigner is arrested for "assault with a deadly swine flu". The Bulgarian nurses in Libya case springs to mind as something that could well be replicated in Korea.
Not surprising in the least. It's not so bad if they allow the quarantine days to come out of the teacher's sick days, since most teachers probably use only a fraction of their sick days anyway. But I wouldn't be surprised if some schools tried to take the quarantine out of teachers' vacation days, or went the "unpaid leave" route, as in Matt's case.
We all know teachers are probably just as likely to contract H1N1 inside Korea --in fact, probably more likely, seeing as how the teachers are surrounded by kids all day at work, but (hopefully!)not while on vacation in another country. But in my experience, logic rarely comes into consideration at public schools in Korea; people follow the orders that come down from the principal or the board of education, end of story. Arguing that some policy doesn't make sense is like pissing into the wind.
bingbing:
Now I'm no medical expert, but shouldn't the teacher have been cleaning the tip with alcohol before checking the next kid?
The kids all eat kimchi, so no need for hygiene, right? :)
Interesting how nobody has wondered about what's going to happen this winter break when we all want to go for vacations outside the country (or many of us anyways)--will they still have the same policy then? I wonder ...
Brian, the title of this post is misleading ... quarantine comes out of your SICK DAYS--not vacation.
No one seems to have gotten confused ... but ... yeah.
Thanks Jason, surprised nobody caught that. I guess that's when happens when I'm in a hurry in Pennsylvania and try to blog.
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