Over the past three months, I contacted the only published email address (info@isrimini.com) on multiple occasions. On 13 February 2026, I wrote to you directly. On 26 February, I followed up, noting that I had received no reply. Responses, if they came, arrived after several days and were sent by "ISR School's Office" — who addressed my daughter as "Paola" and me as "Paul", both of which are wrong.

It took some time before it became clear that our family is based in China (we are Germans) and is not in a position to simply travel to Rimini for an introductory meeting, even though they had expressly explained this from the very first letter.

In the interim, I received a letter praising the tax advantages of San Marino, accompanied by a PDF from the Chamber of Commerce of San Remo. I found this document somewhat awkward, given that San Marino joined the OECD Common Reporting Standard in 2017 and has since largely lost its status as a tax haven.
And we are parents looking for a school—not tax avoidance, or even evasion!

A video call was eventually arranged, after two months!
From that conversation, I learned the following:

- The IRS combines two PYP year groups — for example P4 and P5 — into a single class due to insufficient student numbers. The educational consequences are significant: the teacher must continuously switch between two levels, to the detriment of both groups and their social development.

- Students are generally permitted to speak Italian during lessons, described as an application of the IB's "translanguaging" principle. For a family whose daughter has been assessed as an English native speaker and achieved WIDA Level 6.0 across all domains, this is not a minor concern — it is disqualifying.

- The school currently enrols 75 students and aims to reach 95 within four months, with a stated "technical capacity" of 120. Having reviewed their website and social media, we are unable to envisage how 120 students would be accommodated on the available outdoor space.

- The absence of sports facilities, a gymnasium, a library and - of course - a campus is addressed through cooperation agreements with external organisations.

The "ISR School's Office", whose command of English appeared limited for a representative of an English-medium IB school, did not answer a single one of our questions, I had submitted in advance.
Instead, the conversation turned at one point to the merits of Rimini's nightlife — an argument that, I confess, left us somewhat puzzled when selecting an academic environment for a nine-year-old child.

When the discussion moved to fees and any possible consideration for our family, the senior management visibly withdrew from the conversation. It became apparent that neither party present had the authority — or the preparation — to address the substantive questions a relocating international family would reasonably expect to have answered.

The "ISR School's Office" confirmed that the school does not offer any structured support for relocating international families, and that no tailored proposals can be made without owner approval.

One further observation: the domain isrimini.com — registered for eight years with GoDaddy — lapsed approximately six weeks ago and was not renewed. Any visitor to their former and origin website is currently informed by GoDaddy that the domain fees were not paid. The reputational damage and the loss of search engine ranking are likely to be considerable.

We also note that Italy ranks 59th in the EF English Proficiency Index — last among all European countries. In our experience, insufficient English proficiency among students leads to an informal italianisation of instruction, even in officially English-medium classrooms. This was a challenge we observed in the lower PYP years at our daughter's current school in China, where the proportion of native English-speaking students is significantly higher than at IRS.

Having considered all of the above, we have concluded — with genuine regret, as Rimini had featured prominently in our planning for several months — that IRS is not a suitable environment for our child.