DAIS, in its fifth year of operation, is right next to Campus Village, surrounded by hills turning a beautiful orange now as perhaps the final turn toward winter comes. Golden Pebble Beach is only a fifteen-minute walk away. Buses pick students up from DDA and downtown. Inside the school are great open spaces, and everything’s clean and bright. Outside, there’s construction, an expansion in progress, the completion of which will come in stages: first a gym, then dance and yoga studios, and finally a pool, all of which the community will be able to use. “A lot of the things you spend extra time on to convey your standards and your expectations,” Liang said about her business. You can tell how much careful work has gone into the school. It made me keep thinking the word home.
DAIS students must be foreign-passport holders. Right now there are 342 students, from twenty-three countries, with Americans making up 52 percent of the population. Each class, pre-K through twelfth grade, has no more than twenty-five students. There’s even a Montessori class of three-year-olds, something DAIS added at the community’s request. It’s great to see the variety of students.
The international teachers at DAIS are certified and must have two years’ experience. The normal contract is for two years, but many teachers have chosen to stay on for three. “We’ve built such a great community that many expatriates ask for extensions,” Liang said. “You do have to have a fun personality and a sense of adventure. You also have to have flexibility because you really don’t know.” She laughed. “Some of the things you just don’t control, because you can’t.” The teachers must be good to even get through the interview with International School Services, which vets potential international teachers. In the international-teaching community, word gets around, Liang said. If you’re bad, everybody’s going to know. Differentiating the curriculum is also critical because students come from a variety of schools. Any teacher who applies to DAIS must be able to vary assignments in order to address each student’s pace. This means that even within the same classroom, there might be different assignments going on. Many of the classrooms I visited had, in addition to the teacher, a parent volunteer working with the students.
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