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British school in Prague will close

BISP owner cedes facilities and faculty to new PBS school

By Kimberly Ashton
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
May 23rd, 2007 issue

KURT VINION/THE PRAGUE POST
BISP teachers Michal Pavelka, Lucie Choc, John Bagust, Katherine Leech and Albert Loddo look forward to "a spirit of commitment" at PBS.
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Three weeks ago, teachers and administrators at the British International School of Prague (BISP) announced they were leaving en masse and setting up a new school. Shortly thereafter, the owner of BISP declared that this new school would not get to use the BISP campuses.
Now he seems to have changed his mind. As of press time, lawyers for both BISP and the new Prague British School (PBS) were ironing out the finer points of a deal that will end BISP. As part of this deal, the new PBS would take over BISP campuses, located in Prague 4 and Prague 6.
“There was really only one realistic option,” says Fraser Litster, BISP’s development and marketing manager and future member of PBS’s board of directors. He notes that keeping students “settled” is the priority of the deal reached after swift negotiations earlier this month.
The transition should have little, if any, effect on students in the short term. BISP will continue until the end of this school year without interruption and the plan is to start anew in the fall. All the teachers who would have taught at BISP next year are returning to PBS, Litster said. And, with the same curriculum, and a roughly 15 percent lower tuition, he expects most of the students will, too.
According to one parent, discontent among parents and faculty had been growing since the beginning of the school year. Michal Bočan, whose children go to BISP, said he and other parents began discussing a plan to create a new school since October. Bočan and another private investor, whom Litster declined to name because he requested anonymity, are financing PBS.
Albert Loddo came to BISP in September from Gibraltar, where he was teaching at an English school. He said he felt uneasy as soon as he arrived. “It’s a question of survival,” Loddo said earlier this month, describing the insecurity he felt about his employment at BISP.
He says he feels things at PBS will be different. “The spirit of collegiality and of commitment to it fills me with hope.”
In a May 4 interview with The Prague Post, Bočan said there had been “widespread dissatisfaction with the closed nature of decision-making at BISP.” Litster put it simply as “differences with the owner.”
Those differences eventually caused more than half the administrators and most of the teachers to pack their bags.
At the beginning of May, those administrators, and some teachers, handed in their resignations. By then, plans to start PBS were well under way, and open enrollment started shortly thereafter.
PBS organizers wanted to locate their school on the current BISP campus, but owner Robert Blasko said he had 16 more years left on his lease and intended to stay.
“They can’t locate their school on our premises,” he told The Prague Post May 3.
Fresh start
Blasko’s convictions to keep the BISP campuses changed after a May 8 breakthrough in negotiations. “Mr. Blasko approached [us] and was keen to solve the situation as quickly and as smoothly and as cordially as possible,” Litster said.
Both sides signed a framework agreement to begin working to hand over BISP grounds to PBS. It came down to the best interests of the children, and that’s what moved Blasko to negotiate, Litster said. “The losers would have been the almost 700 kids who come to the school,” he said.
“The main reason is the students, quite honestly,” Blasko, who lives in Switzerland and comes to Prague regularly, said May 18. The other option, to compete as separate schools, would have served nobody, he said.
Jane Mitchell, who has children enrolled in years one and eight, said she was initially shocked and worried when she heard of the split. “Then it became very clear very soon that a lot of the staff [agreed] with it,” and that reassured her, she said.
She planned to send her children to PBS wherever it was located; the important thing to her was that her children have the teachers they had at BISP.
Mitchell is also looking forward to having greater parental input in how the school is run — a principle that is a hallmark of PBS. At BISP, she felt her concerns and suggestions were ultimately falling on deaf ears; the staff was responsive but did not have the power to enact changes.
“It’s quite exciting to see that the management structure is going to have parental involvement, which is something BISP didn’t have,” she said. She was also impressed with how quickly the two sides reached an agreement.
“There was a genuine and almost audible sense of relief that this wasn’t going to drag on and on,” Litster said.
“It’s a fresh start, and that’s always exciting,” Mitchell said.
The financiers behind PBS are also planning changes outside Prague. They will soon look at opening another school in Moravia, according to Litster.  
An increasing number of expats, and the companies they work for, are moving there and the demand for English education is high, he said. Much of this demand, as with BISP in Prague, comes from Czechs, too. About 30 percent of the students now at BISP are Czech.

Kimberly Ashton can be reached at kashton@praguepost.com


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