British school on 'Big Hill' is quite at home on U.S. turf

Chicago Tribune - February 10, 2005
By Jon Anderson

It was snack time in the Dancing Ducks room.

Around a table, a dozen toddlers were learning to share, say "please" and "thank you," handle a cup of milk and pass the fruit around.

Next door, the Terrific Turtles, attentively listening to a story, sat in a circle on the floor, under a list of Golden Rules. Keep your classroom tidy. Keep your hands and feet to yourself. Use a classroom voice. Share with your friends.

"We're a small school," headmaster Michael Horton explained Tuesday, "And we aim for a family atmosphere." That, Horton added, means attention to manners, no running in the hallways, hands up in class to ask questions. For teachers, it means "listening to a child, so you hear where they have misunderstood a lesson," he said. "My own philosophy is that no child deliberately gets something wrong."

"If they do make a mistake, it's the way they've been told the material," he said. These are good times for the British School of Chicago . Its banners fly high above a failed parochial school on a North Side avenue called Bryn Mawr, which, as the staff well knows, is a phrase that means Big Hill in Welsh, one of the several languages of Great Britain.

The school opened in the fall of 2001 with 11 children. It now has 185 pupils, in preschool through 7th grade. Despite tuition charges that average $16,000 a year, enrollment is expected to jump to 250 next year. It is adding a class a year until it completes high school.

Almost 80 percent of the pupils are American. That, reports Horton, has been a surprise to the developers of the for-profit British Schools of America chain that started in Washington and now has outposts in Boston, Houston, Chicago and Charlotte. They expect to have 20 schools by the end of the decade.

"Robert Findlay, it was his brainchild," Horton said, dipping into the history of the enterprise. An employee of a relocation agency, Findlay was dispatched to Washington in the early 1990s to find British system schooling for children of employees of an oil company being shifted to America.

"There are three American schools in London, but no British schools in Washington," Findlay reported. The original idea was to attract the expatriate and embassy communities in the nation's capital, but the organizers quickly found that Americans were interested as well. "There's a little more discipline, but in a kind way. My two grandchildren enjoy it here," Kathy Albert said Tuesday.

Albert, who volunteers once a week, was sitting in a corner of a classroom, helping with arts and crafts. "We liked the academics, lofty but reasonable," added parent Krista Austin. Still, when son Patrick, 5, started two years ago, she said, "it was daunting to have our 3-year-old speaking French." Unlike the images of British schools in movies, pupils at the British School of Chicago do not study in freezing classrooms, move about in chains, eat gruel for lunch or sneak off on toots with the younger members of the royal family.

What they do like is to have their work pinned up on walls.

One feature of the rehabbing of the old parochial school was the installation in every hallway of wallboards, now covered with poems, art works, essays, descriptions of hopes and dreams, and character sketches from the recent school production of "Treasure Island."

"We would have put more wallboards up, in the stairwells, but the fire marshal told us not to," Horton said, before offering a visitor cookies and tea.