School portraits / Three weeks between a job offer and a Grade 9 start
The One-Time Fees
An American father in a Riyadh hotel room, a relocation package that covered tuition, and the SAR 40,212 that was not tuition.
Marcus Delgado had a relocation package, a son going into Grade 9, and a fee listing for the American International School Riyadh that he read in a hotel room at midnight with the lights of the north of the city doing nothing to help. The package covered tuition. The listing had a second column.
Marcus had told HR the tuition figure with the confidence of a man who had read a fee page once and the whole page nearly. SAR 120,757 for Grades 9 to 12, including VAT, for non-Saudi families. HR, in the person of a cheerful woman in Houston called Dana, had said that was fine. Dana said most things were fine. Then he scrolled down. Application fee, SAR 5,027. Capital fee, SAR 18,221, non-refundable. Registration, SAR 16,964. He added them twice on the hotel notepad and got SAR 40,212 both times, which was annoying, because he had been hoping for a mistake.
His son Tyler, fourteen, was asleep in the other bed with his headphones still on. Marcus woke him to share the figure, which was not fair, but he had been in the Kingdom six days and needed a witness. Tyler listened, calculated, and asked whether the capital fee was refundable if he did not go. “Non-refundable.” “So they keep it either way.” “That’s what non-refundable means.” Tyler said in that case he would go, since it was already paid for in spirit, and went back to sleep, having solved the problem from his side.
The call with Dana was at seven in the morning Riyadh, which was the previous evening in Houston, which Marcus felt gave her an unfair advantage. He explained. He used the phrase one-time fees. Dana said the policy covered tuition. He said the fees were a condition of paying tuition. Dana said she would check. Marcus had been in corporate life long enough to know that “I will check” has a half-life of about a week, and that a school year, unlike HR, starts on a date.
He spent the week doing the thing you do in a city you do not yet know, which is drive to the school and look at it. The campus was in the north near Al Bustan Village, purpose-built, open since 2014, and the morning traffic on the road past it was, Tyler said, “like a game, but one you can lose”. Marcus timed the journey from the compound they had not yet rented. He checked whether a bus went to it. He told Tyler that the capital fee had built something, and pointed vaguely at a wall, and Tyler said it was a nice wall and he hoped it was the eighteen thousand one.
Dana came back on the Thursday. The fees could be covered under the one-time relocation allowance, provided Marcus submitted the school’s own fee schedule, the invoice, and a form. The form had a box asking whether the amount was refundable. Marcus wrote No and underlined it so hard the pen went through to the page beneath, which was the hotel’s breakfast menu, and which he then had to explain at checkout.
On the first day of school he dropped Tyler at the gate at seven-twenty, in a line of cars that moved with the dignity of a funeral, and watched him walk in without looking back. He sat for a moment with the engine running. SAR 40,212, he thought, was the price of the gate. He had budgeted for the building and forgotten the door.