The Planning Stage - I

Hi everyone, and firstly thank you very much to those of you who could make the get-together at Il Pinguino on Saturday.

Meeting so many with the desire to create a wonderful learning atmosphere for our children was inspiring and encouraging, and here's a quick summary/follow up on it (as I remember it anyway, please put your recollections/thoughts in the comments!),

Conclusions,

1. We need to work on getting some more families (21 so far have replied) to answer the survey in order to decide amongst us the best way to organise a full time Kingsbury School.  So far numbers for the 5-6 age group are encouraging, as is the 9-10 group.  More "yes pleases/no thanks" required though!

2. The Kingsbury pre-school/afternoon club would be well supported right away and can easily go ahead. This could be run by an experienced Montessori teacher with other support for the younger ones, however *we need premises*:  We should all to look into the various options (please add your own different views in the comments)  including:

a. renting a space with garden (it would be easier to start the school classes with this option) or

b. renting school premises in the afternoon after local students have gone home,or,

c. other space granted from the Comune or another association.

3. An informal committee should be formed in the next week or so to share tasks/responsibilities.  More info on this in a separate post in the next couple of days.

4. Part time school option/satellite school for those who live too far away to attend every day especially in the Garfagnana valley would be well supported, especially amongst the high livers (you know who you are!) there.

5. Whilst this blog will be the public place for the school, much of the discussion/planning will be on Facebook at the Kingsbury School group  Facebook is a lot safer and clearer now and the privacy settings are much easier to manage.  Talk to any of the current Kingsbury Facebookers for advice if you're concerned.  Get stuck in!

The key thing at the moment is to get new people to click on the survey link and respond.  Let's aim to get the numbers up to 100 families, which should be easy.  Don't be put off by geography: we have friends in Florence who would move to Lucca  at the drop of a hat if there was a full time international school up and running.  No doubt this will be true of lots of others too: it is a wonderful town to be in or near, as we all know.

Anyway, this will only work if we all roll our sleeves up and dedicate some time to this exciting project for us all.

Let's do it...