Hi all!
I just discovered this thread and the information available is really hugely useful, thank you all for sharing!
We are currently in a process of moving to Sint Stevens Woluwe from downtown Brussels (probably over the summer). We have a 6-year old son (he shall turn 6 this May) and a baby girl of 13 months. Our son is currenlty attending the European School in Uccle, but we are rather unhappy with his language section and consider it beneficial to move him to a public Belgian school. For now the two 'shortlisted' options for us are GBS Kraainem and GBS Sint Stevens Woluwe - we had appointments with both over the last few days.
I wonder what has been your experice with GBS Kraainem or GBS Sint Stevens Woluwe? Are they supportive? Are they open to non-Dutch speaking foreigners? Our son speaks fluently Hungarian, Bulgarian and fairly good English, but no Dutch. Is the teaching process well-structured? Are the classes of reasonable size? Anything - absolutely any aspect - you may have to share would be greatly appreciated.
We already met the headmistresses of the two schools, both seemed very nice and spent time explaining us everything in English. Perhaps I like the GBS Kraainem slightly better than the one in Sint Stevens Woluwe (Leuvensesteenweg 194), but the school trip would be somewhat more complicated logisticaly. In both schools they said that if our son started almost immediatelly and he got some coaching over the summer, he may have fair chances to 'pass' the Dutch comprehension exam that he needs to enter primary school - a major worry for me. I am a bit scared that this may put a lot of pressure on him - we've been through many changes in the last 2 months moving from Italy to Brussels and moving him from his beloved English pre-school in Italy to EEB-1 in Uccle - but both Flemish headmistresses agreed that given his linguistic background and what I described them he is now doing, keeping him for another year in pre-school may not be productive...Kraainem seemed to me a bit more 'relaxed' in language terms, perhaps due to the fact that they are a commune facilite.
So, any info you might have about these two schools would be much appreciated!