It’s starting to feel like bidding for our next post is right around the corner. Even though it’s the “summer” bidding season, it doesn’t usually start for me and my colleagues until September, so we still have the whole summer to get through.
As I’d mentioned in December, A’s medical clearance usually takes a bit longer. Mine took two weeks. Here we are now in the middle of March, and he still doesn’t have a clearance. I’m not too worried about it at this point as technically he doesn’t really need one absolutely finalized until we start asking for travel orders next year.
But it is the tiniest bit annoying that they’re waiting until he gets his updated IEP and psycho-educational evaluation from the school in April to make a final determination. Which again, is kind of pointless as the results of the clearance will likely be the same with or without it. But I’m trying not to let it bother me.
The fact that his psych-ed eval isn’t until April is another small source of irritation. His last one was in 2018. The school system is supposed to update them every three years. And I started asking them to update it back in 2021. At the time, they told me that they didn’t need to update it since he was already getting services. Since we weren’t going anywhere right away, I didn’t push it.
Then I started asking for it again this last summer. His Special Education case manager said she’d look into it. I brought it up again a few months later, she didn’t respond. So this time I went to the school admin assistant who forwarded my email directly to the Special Education Department Chair. She said they’d be happy to reassess him, but they have a heavy case load and won’t be able to assess him until May.
The one thing I do need for bidding is an approval letter from an overseas school saying that they’ll be able to accept and support him…and they usually want current materials like grades, IEPs…and a recent psych-ed eval…to make that decision. And overseas schools usually shut down in June for summer break. So I pushed back on this one and pointed out the fact that I’ve been asking for an updated evaluation for three years and May is too late. So they were able to push it up to April.
Other than that, I’ve reached out to a few of the OMSs currently in the jobs that I’m interested in. We’re generally discouraged from bugging them so early, but I don’t want to jump through all the hoops with a school if the job isn’t going to be right for me. So it’s nice to know what I’d be getting into first.
As for locations, I’m looking at Europe again. Mostly because it’s easier logistically, and I understand how things work…and I do love living in Europe in general. I did look at a few more exotic posts, but something always seemed to come up.
I was very excited about Kazakhstan at one point and then realized that it required a year of language training first, which I wouldn’t mind! But A wants more time to make friends at his new school and doesn’t want to move his junior year, which makes sense to me.
Another time, I was looking at Kenya, but they’ve decided they no longer want large dogs in their housing as they’ve had a lot of evacuations recently and large dogs were harder to deal with than smaller ones. So we wouldn’t be able to bring Thorfinn. Cross that one off. China also doesn’t allow big dogs.
Japan would’ve been interesting, but the international schools all have long waiting lists and don’t give any preference to US Embassy kids, even though some of them get a lot of funding from the US Embassy. So we could conceivably arrive at post and then find out A doesn’t have a school. Nope. Too risky.
Any school in the Southern Hemisphere is also off the list as their summers and winters are reversed, so we would have to leave post in the middle of his senior year, which would totally screw him up for graduating from high school. Again, not an option. So Europe!
I also plan to sell our house when we leave. As lucky as we were to get a low interest rate before things went crazy, paying a mortgage would still take half my salary, which kind of defeats the whole purpose of living in free government housing overseas. And we’d have no money to travel and really experience life abroad.
I thought about renting it out…but there’re no guarantee that we’d get a good tenant that wouldn’t destroy the place and cost me thousands of dollars in repairs (if our noisy, pot-smoking neighbors with an off-leash pit bull are anything to compare with)…or that it would remain continually occupied. When I bought it, it had been an empty rental for six months before they decided to sell.
So there you have it. Just a few things on my mind as we edge toward summer bid season!
In-Flight Movie - DC Edition 