My diploma was issued by the Department of Defense Overseas Dependents Schools - Matthew C. Perry High School, MCAS Iwakuni Japan.
I put myself in the public high school category since the Marines/military didn’t influence nor were involved with the course of instruction or behavior (any more than the local police would be involved with disruptive or illegal behavior) and it was public funded.
I can’t imagine a better experience. I’m thinking a Military Brats/Overseas Brats poll/thread should be started; I’m working on poll categories (Military Brat/Overseas Military Brat/Civilian Government Worker Brat/Civilian Military Contractor (TechRep) Brat).
There are schools on any overseas base with military dependents. Most of the schools, called Department of Defense Dependents Schools, are in Germany, but there are schools in Korea, Japan, Britain, Italy, Turkey, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, the Azores, etc.
Like dba Fred says, they are very similar to public schools, only your teachers are employed by the Department of Defense and you go on way better field trips. The turnover in most schools is really high, and you have to learn to make new friends constantly. Oh, and half the high school girls were dating soldiers stationed on the base. I’d say at least half of the people from high school have since been in the military.
Do these on-base schools attempt to streamline their cirricula? Like, if someone is in Mrs. J’s Freshman English class in Okinawa studying Chaucer, and then his dad gets transferred and he enrolls in Mrs. K’s Freshman English class in Turkey, would he pick up where he left off (with Chaucer)?
I should add that in my second last year of high school I was a student of the New South Wales Correspondence School. It’s normally for students in remote parts of NSW, and students who can’t (e.g., because of disability) attend normal schools, but I was enrolled in it while my family and I were in London, England. I may hold the record here for being the student who had the longest distance to travel to school, seeing as I would have had to travel about 20,000 km to get there.
That’s a really good question that I don’t know the answer to. I really doubt it, though. There was barely any attempt to have any continuity within the same school. For example, I ended up reading the same book twice in 10th grade because I was switched into the other 10th grade English class. (The teacher didn’t have enough books to have all the students reading the same book at the same time, so the classes read in shifts.) The thing that was really surprising is that I had the same teacher for both classes, and he apparently didn’t care that I had already taken the test. In other words, typical public school stuff.
I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the schools use the same textbooks, but I don’t know if the schools in Korea would necessarily have the same textbooks that we used in Europe. I would assume not, although maybe the DoD buys in bulk.
When I attended the building was in a dire state. Much of the school consisted of “temporary” huts built between the 50s and 70s which remained in use right up until the last couple of years and there was asbestos in the walls right up until the school closed down.
A couple of years ago they finally tore down the school and built a completely new one in its place. It was opened for use last year and looks like a much nicer educational environment.
As there is no UK equivalent of a High School Diploma, it still makes voting a challenge. You do not graduate high school - you just leave at some point, with or without a collection of exam results (CSEs or A levels). But there is no single bar which has to be cleared to be regarded as having successfully “graduated.”
Anyway, the school I left after getting some A-levels was a state school.
I checked Home school because it was closest to what my high school was ( A one-room private schoolhouse in the basement of a church). I however did not earn a GED or a local equivalency diploma. I have a full NYS Regents Diploma (with a full board of tests to qualify).