Is there a way to know how much a Board of Education pays to get a JET at their school? How much of that is subsidized? Looking for people with specific knowledge on how bad it hurts a BOE when a JET breaks contract.
I’m assuming the subsidies are minimal, otherwise, the amount of BoEs who use JET ALTs would be much higher. That being said, I would think that they get some sort of financial break when there’s no ALT due to them breaking the contract.
If a board of education facing slight hardship is an issue, perhaps you need to think about how necessary it is to break contract in that case.
(I have never directly spoken with a BoE about how much they pay CLAIR, so anyone who has obviously has more clout than my ponderings above)
CLAIR has an annual budget of ~500 million USD. We get paid more than a lot of Japanese teachers. It’s hard to say by how much, but they do subsidize our salaries in part, since that gives them regulatory power over how contracting orgs that participate in JET conduct themselves. It’s also a big reason why private companies like Interac can’t match a JET salary. A lot of that budget probably also goes to candidate recruitment and acquisition, paying CLAIR employees, training seminars and orientations, counseling services and grants etc, etc. I’m fairly certain that the contracting org pays for the flight home considering how hard I just had to negotiate with mine for my flight allowance.
The real pain you should be concerned with during a contract break comes from finding a replacement. As you are aware, it takes around 10 months to produce a JET from application to arrival.
So when you break a contract, your assigned schools no longer have an English teacher until likely next year. What happens then is your other JET colleagues have to shuffle their schedule to visit your your school and fulfill your duties for the rest of the year until a new JET can arrive. We see our own schools less often, so the English education suffers across the whole school board.
A contract breaker would lose their flight allowance and depending on how long they stayed, be liable to pay a hefty lump sum of taxes and other insurance premiums. You see, Japan collects everything for the previous year. So when your wages are garnished, that money is being used to pay for your previous year’s taxes and benefits. When you leave mid year, you are required to pay the remaining amount for the previous year, that would have been collected from your future wages that year.
You will also lose any chance of a favorable recommendation, which leaves a hole in your employment history on a CV.
All in all, it’s a thing you really don’t want to consider except in the most dire of circumstances. If you just don’t like the job, then you should grit your teeth and work to the end of your contract like the adult you now are.
Edit: I see a lot of entitled kids probably fresh out of school who have yet to understand that their actions in the workplace matter and affect other people. Reality is gonna hit hard one day. If you have a legitimate emergency to go home, by all means, go. But otherwise I think OP and anyone else who may be thinking of breaking contract should try to make the best of their placement.
The annual salary will be lower than Japanese teachers as JETs are an expense and not a true salaried government employee, but the associated costs and time and expenses are about the same as your salary (gross), and not all cities get subsidies. Depends on the city, school(s), or a prefectural or municipal Board of Education.
The rule of thumb is it costs double your salary to keep you there the first year but decreases slightly each year you renew. If you break a contract, some cities will spend countless hours in meetings with the elected officials, and the municipality, not all of it pleasant as the budget needs to be increased, decreased, changed, etc., and reputations and future careers are put in jeopardy when such a failure happens. At the very least, breaking a contract makes life and finances difficult, sometimes in a big way.
The information you’re looking for might be interesting but you should never ever use it as a reason to avoid breaking contract. Every contracted employee in Japan has the option of breaking contracts if they really really need to or really really want to, and the program is no exception.
One would hope that most people are in a position where they can finish out their contract but if this is not the case then get out when you need to.
Or to put it more strongly, if you’re using the board of education’s costs as a reason to avoid getting out when you need to, and then you have some bigger problem that occurs as a result, you’ve just screwed everyone over because of your weird pride.
Meh. There are worse contracts to break.
The overall cost of getting your butt to Japan is super low, from a “government spending,” or “corporate spending” viewpoint. In fact, getting you to Japan probably put way more money back into the Japanese economy than it took out.
I once cost a company I worked for $10,000+ to fly my in and out of Bangkok to fix something. Last minute business class flights are balls expensive.
I felt bad about it for about, 2 seconds. Then I got handed the wine list.
Edit: Think of it this way. During the swine flu epidemic in 2010~, the government bought doses of Tamiflu (or some other bullshit anti-flu drug VERY NEWLY approved) for every man woman and child in Japan.
Times three.
Then the swine flu went away.
And the Japanese government tried to back out, but Roche said “oh no no no hohohoho.”
Point of this story: No matter what you do, you will never be that big of a fuck up. Believe in yourself!
Thanks for this thread
Government subsidies depends on how poor the town your BOE is in. If you’re way out in the middle of nowhere in a town with very little industry and income, then they don’t really pay for the JETs at all. If these small towns actually had to pay the full costs for a JET ALT, then they’d switch to dispatch (or pray and put out feelers for a direct hire) in a heartbeat.
Do not concern yourself with this in the slightest. They don’t care about your life, they have a budget that vastly exceeds you, they are fine. Do exclusively what benefits your life.
Honestly idk if the BOEs super care.
I’m in an Inaka prefecture and have friends who are in the tiny towns within that prefecture. BOEs cap them at 3 years, even though the increase between year 3 and 4 is miniscule and doesn’t really compare to the cost of bringing a new JET in. My BOE is almost the same- they will only keep you on for a 4th year under super specific circumstances. Slightly bigger budget though as we’re actually a city.
BOE’s as a whole don’t really care about their JETs beyond as a worker. So don’t be too worried about screwing them out of money- they do that themselves as is lol.
9 comments
I’m assuming the subsidies are minimal, otherwise, the amount of BoEs who use JET ALTs would be much higher. That being said, I would think that they get some sort of financial break when there’s no ALT due to them breaking the contract.
If a board of education facing slight hardship is an issue, perhaps you need to think about how necessary it is to break contract in that case.
(I have never directly spoken with a BoE about how much they pay CLAIR, so anyone who has obviously has more clout than my ponderings above)
CLAIR has an annual budget of ~500 million USD. We get paid more than a lot of Japanese teachers. It’s hard to say by how much, but they do subsidize our salaries in part, since that gives them regulatory power over how contracting orgs that participate in JET conduct themselves. It’s also a big reason why private companies like Interac can’t match a JET salary. A lot of that budget probably also goes to candidate recruitment and acquisition, paying CLAIR employees, training seminars and orientations, counseling services and grants etc, etc. I’m fairly certain that the contracting org pays for the flight home considering how hard I just had to negotiate with mine for my flight allowance.
The real pain you should be concerned with during a contract break comes from finding a replacement. As you are aware, it takes around 10 months to produce a JET from application to arrival.
So when you break a contract, your assigned schools no longer have an English teacher until likely next year. What happens then is your other JET colleagues have to shuffle their schedule to visit your your school and fulfill your duties for the rest of the year until a new JET can arrive. We see our own schools less often, so the English education suffers across the whole school board.
A contract breaker would lose their flight allowance and depending on how long they stayed, be liable to pay a hefty lump sum of taxes and other insurance premiums. You see, Japan collects everything for the previous year. So when your wages are garnished, that money is being used to pay for your previous year’s taxes and benefits. When you leave mid year, you are required to pay the remaining amount for the previous year, that would have been collected from your future wages that year.
You will also lose any chance of a favorable recommendation, which leaves a hole in your employment history on a CV.
All in all, it’s a thing you really don’t want to consider except in the most dire of circumstances. If you just don’t like the job, then you should grit your teeth and work to the end of your contract like the adult you now are.
Edit: I see a lot of entitled kids probably fresh out of school who have yet to understand that their actions in the workplace matter and affect other people. Reality is gonna hit hard one day. If you have a legitimate emergency to go home, by all means, go. But otherwise I think OP and anyone else who may be thinking of breaking contract should try to make the best of their placement.
The annual salary will be lower than Japanese teachers as JETs are an expense and not a true salaried government employee, but the associated costs and time and expenses are about the same as your salary (gross), and not all cities get subsidies. Depends on the city, school(s), or a prefectural or municipal Board of Education.
The rule of thumb is it costs double your salary to keep you there the first year but decreases slightly each year you renew. If you break a contract, some cities will spend countless hours in meetings with the elected officials, and the municipality, not all of it pleasant as the budget needs to be increased, decreased, changed, etc., and reputations and future careers are put in jeopardy when such a failure happens. At the very least, breaking a contract makes life and finances difficult, sometimes in a big way.
The information you’re looking for might be interesting but you should never ever use it as a reason to avoid breaking contract. Every contracted employee in Japan has the option of breaking contracts if they really really need to or really really want to, and the program is no exception.
One would hope that most people are in a position where they can finish out their contract but if this is not the case then get out when you need to.
Or to put it more strongly, if you’re using the board of education’s costs as a reason to avoid getting out when you need to, and then you have some bigger problem that occurs as a result, you’ve just screwed everyone over because of your weird pride.
Meh. There are worse contracts to break.
The overall cost of getting your butt to Japan is super low, from a “government spending,” or “corporate spending” viewpoint. In fact, getting you to Japan probably put way more money back into the Japanese economy than it took out.
I once cost a company I worked for $10,000+ to fly my in and out of Bangkok to fix something. Last minute business class flights are balls expensive.
I felt bad about it for about, 2 seconds. Then I got handed the wine list.
Edit: Think of it this way. During the swine flu epidemic in 2010~, the government bought doses of Tamiflu (or some other bullshit anti-flu drug VERY NEWLY approved) for every man woman and child in Japan.
Times three.
Then the swine flu went away.
And the Japanese government tried to back out, but Roche said “oh no no no hohohoho.”
[https://www.forbes.com/global/2009/0608/epidemic-tamiflu-japan-struggles-against-swine-flu.html?sh=2f1d670556bb](https://www.forbes.com/global/2009/0608/epidemic-tamiflu-japan-struggles-against-swine-flu.html?sh=2f1d670556bb)
Point of this story: No matter what you do, you will never be that big of a fuck up. Believe in yourself!
Thanks for this thread
Government subsidies depends on how poor the town your BOE is in. If you’re way out in the middle of nowhere in a town with very little industry and income, then they don’t really pay for the JETs at all. If these small towns actually had to pay the full costs for a JET ALT, then they’d switch to dispatch (or pray and put out feelers for a direct hire) in a heartbeat.
Do not concern yourself with this in the slightest. They don’t care about your life, they have a budget that vastly exceeds you, they are fine. Do exclusively what benefits your life.
Honestly idk if the BOEs super care.
I’m in an Inaka prefecture and have friends who are in the tiny towns within that prefecture. BOEs cap them at 3 years, even though the increase between year 3 and 4 is miniscule and doesn’t really compare to the cost of bringing a new JET in.
My BOE is almost the same- they will only keep you on for a 4th year under super specific circumstances. Slightly bigger budget though as we’re actually a city.
BOE’s as a whole don’t really care about their JETs beyond as a worker. So don’t be too worried about screwing them out of money- they do that themselves as is lol.