Imagine you are assigned to relocate to Europe on less than a month”™s notice.
You have three children ”“ all in need of academic enrollment overseas ”“ and no immediate knowledge of the destination you are moving to.
This is where Elizabeth Perelstein and her 11-year-old company School Choice International Inc. step in.
For more than a decade, the White Plains-based global educational consulting firm has been navigating families through different countries”™ curricula and wading through wait lists.
The firm has grown to employ 90 worldwide consultants in more than 50 countries and serves as the educational go-to for several large corporations that include Kraft, Xerox, GE, Cartus Corp. and Diageo.
“With any international assignee, when they have an opportunity like this especially in these times when you often have little or no choice (to move), I think School Choice opens that up and makes them confident in their decision,” said Deborah Minnar, international assignments senior specialist at Diageo North America in Norwalk, Conn. “There is a huge screening process they go through with all of our executives.”
That preliminary screening process lays the groundwork for what sort of school a family will select.
“We”™re very much organized around goodness of fit,” Perelstein said. “While we let families look at schools on their mental list, such as what”™s been recommended to them by colleagues, we always try to start fresh with a child”™s strengths and weaknesses, where they”™ve thrived and learning styles.”
Logistics are another major factor.
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“If a family moves to another country and they don”™t know about traffic patterns and they have two children enrolled in two different schools on different ends of Bangkok, they”™ll spend all day in the car,” Perelstein said.
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The shift in the economy has impacted School Choice”™s client base.
“There has been a huge spike in the research we do because companies are evaluating their policies for paying tuition,” Perelstein said. “Some are evaluating if kids should be sent to local schools or public schools rather than only international schools. They”™re looking at their policies very closely in order to save money and getting accurate information in order to revise or recreate policies.”
For Diageo, the recession had a minor impact on some of those policies.
“I would say that along with other companies, we”™ve reduced our global mobility size a little,” Minnar said. “But, it”™s a liquor business and people drink in this environment. Our higher-end alcohol sales have not gone down. People still want to drink the brand of their choice.”
Perelstein said some companies are trying to save money by giving families a lump sum.
There has also been a change in countries executives are being moved to.
“New plants are opening in inexpensive locations, so there may be a group move to a location where it”™s less expensive to do business,” Perelstein said. “Whereas it used to be that families were moved to fairly traditional and fairly expensive locations, South America and Eastern Europe are newer destinations where the cost of doing business is less.”
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About 80 percent of the company”™s business stems from inbound and outbound international moves; about 20 percent are domestic.
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School Choice charges on a per-child, per-location basis and discounts are afforded to families if more than one child is serviced.
Perelstein said the company has seen a “huge increase in our VIP service,” hinting that senior executives are being recruited to solve problems.
There has also been an increase in usage of the web-based tool Global Education Explorer, which serves as an Internet portal and self-serve resource.
The company is growing to include early child care and elder care services and recently inked a strategic alignment with My Family Care, a European provider of family benefits and emergency life factor services.
“Companies are beginning to be concerned about that (elder care) as well because as the population ages, it”™s a demographic reality,” Perelstein said.
