Our family was part of the ACS community for ten years, until 2025. We left, and what follows explains why.
The current leadership has created a culture in which parental feedback is not just unwelcome — it is actively managed and suppressed. Parents have been told directly by the President not to speak negatively of the school, on the basis that doing so could harm their children's university prospects. We all need to uphold a false image so colleges don't see the flaws. That is not community leadership. It is leverage.
The governance structure has followed suit. Parents previously elected their representatives to the school Board. Shortly after we left, the Board of Trustees changed the rules: parent members are now self-selected by the Board itself. The timing was not coincidental. The effect is that the one formal mechanism through which parents had independent voice has been quietly closed off.
The pattern in how individual concerns are handled is equally deliberate. When groups of parents attempt to meet with leadership collectively to raise systemic, long-standing challenges, the school refuses to meet them as a group. In individual meetings, parents are told their concerns are new and isolated, that no one else has raised them, as if parents dont communicate with each other and know better. The strategy is transparent: keep parents divided, ensure there is no power in numbers, and maintain the appearance that problems don't exist or are being addressed.
ACS charges the highest school fees in the country. It has built a reputation on the back of families who believed in it and advocated for it. That reputation is now being used as a shield against the very accountability that would justify it.
We moved our child to another international school. The contrast in leadership culture has been significant.