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New facilities, new system for EISP

216 million Kč campus ready to open next month

By Brooke Edge
For The Prague Post
August 22nd, 2007 issue

VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
Growing enrollment has forced EISP to move to bigger digs this school year.
VLADIMÍR WEISS/THE PRAGUE POST
The English International School of Prague's new facilities are located just down the street from its old headquarters in Prague 4.
Kids grow out of everything so quickly — shoes, clothes, passions for ballet lessons, football teams and, not surprisingly, even schools. Over the past few years, the English International School of Prague (EISP) has seen a steady rise in enrollment. Administrators soon realized their three separate campuses weren’t big enough to accommodate such demand and began shopping around for a good place to build a school.
They found the perfect spot, just a few blocks from one of one of EISP’s current Prague 4 locations. Construction started last summer on a new, 6,782-square-meter (73,000-square-foot) school. Work on the 216 million Kč ($10.4 million) facility was finished just in time for the first day of school.
In a prepared statement, EISP’s new head teacher, Paul Brewster, states: “The new campus certainly will mark a new beginning for the school, and there’s lots for us all to look forward to as we enter a new chapter in the expansion process.”
Features of the new state-of-the-art facility, which will be able to hold between 450 and 550 students, are indeed impressive. The campus will include three science laboratories, two libraries, two computer labs, a two-story amphitheater, indoor and outdoor sports facilities, extensive space for visual and performing arts and classrooms equipped with interactive whiteboards and laptop ports.
One of the libraries and one of the computer labs are designated especially for EISP’s largest new addition — the “senior school” for students between 14 and 18 years old.
EISP was accredited last spring as an official administrator of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme for its eldest students. This will provide EISP students in their 10th and 11th years with a high-school education acceptable for applying to universities worldwide, as well as being recognized by the Education Ministry. The two-year program is comprehensive, covering languages, social studies, science, math and art.
The new facilities and added grade levels and programs have attracted a number of new enrollments, says Shelley Leighton, the school’s marketing and admissions officer. Between 120 and 130 students slated to begin school in September will be new at EISP, and Leighton is bracing for last-minute enrollees who usually contact the school in the fall. Currently, the school has about 300 students on the roster.
EISP will also bring in a string of new teachers to lead the larger student body, plus three new administrators. In addition to Brewster, who is coming to Prague from the United Kingdom, both the primary and senior schools will have new principals.
“The ethos of the school is going to stay the same,” Leighton says. “This was a concern, or a priority, when we decided to hire a new principal.”
Stability has been an important mainstay at EISP since it opened in Prague in 1995 with 10 students.
“That was the time when the Czech Republic became especially interesting for international investment,” Leighton explains.
To serve non-Czech families relocating to the area for business purposes, international schools began popping up around Prague. “A lot of other international schools opened at that time,” Leighton says, “but we really focused on the younger kids; that’s where we saw a need.”
When it opened, EISP offered education and preschool care for children of nursery-school age through primary school, or students who were 5 and 6 years old.
Over the past 12 years, however, EISP’s focus changed as its student body got older and bigger, and as the preschool market became more crowded. While the school still emphasizes early-childhood education, preschool is no longer its primary selling point, Leighton says.
Now, the school is committed to providing a comprehensive, all-ages educational system for children of more than 35 different nationalities. Most of EISP’s students are British, but there are others from Russia as well as the Netherlands and the Czech Republic.
“We’ve definitely seen the number of Czech students grow in recent years,” says Leighton, who estimates Czechs make up approximately 20 percent of the student body.
“There’s a growing interest [among local parents] in international education, something beyond the Czech system,” she says, citing a more creative and student-centered environment, plus immersion in the English language, as motivations.
As the student body grew in number and required more facilities that come with age and education level, EISP saw an expansion would be necessary. School administrators temporarily solved space issues by taking over more buildings, eventually inhabiting three separate spaces in Prague 4. In the long run, however, administrators simply just wanted everything under one roof, which is why they decided the time had come to build one large school.
This, Leighton says, is when the school’s British ownership — Nord Anglia Education — really stepped up to the plate. The financial support from abroad essentially made EISP’s expansion possible, she says.
“The money we make from this school would not suffice to build a new facility,” Leighton says, “but [Nord Anglia sees] this as an investment.”

Brooke Edge can be reached at specialsection@praguepost.com


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