Issue#25: Navigating New Beginnings: The Merger of Journey San Mateo and Real World School
A Unified Vision for Education and Community Building in Machuca Valley
Before we get into the “news”, some quick historic facts:
A brief history of Schools in Machuca Valley
February, 2016. Casa Sula opens its doors and welcomes it’s first group of 18 children. Casa Sula is owned 50% by Group Orion and 50% by La Ecovilla partners. The school was on the the same grounds where the current RWS school is.
The school was very progressive even for current times, with very strong focus on child-led learning with “teachers”, mainly there to help when needed and a strong focus on environment where children can thrive. School was very successful, especially for younger children with a strong focus on Social-Emotional component.September 2022. Journey San Mateo, a franchise of Journey Tamarindo school opened its doors offering a comprehensive, project-based education for students ranging from 3 to 18 years old. In many ways Journey was a more “traditional”(thought not quite!) alternative to Casa Sula, which appealed to many parents for whom Casa Sula was not a good fit. A number of families left Sula and went to Journey.
August, 2023. Group Orion and LEV Partners have decided to part ways and Casa Sula goes into a 6 months transition period which is filled with uncertainty, trial and error by various leaders and a fair amount of chaos.
December 15, 2023. Casa Sula permanently closes it’s doors.
January 15, 2024. Real World School opens its doors on the same grounds as Casa Sula. The school is under completely new leadership with new owners, new director, new teachers and mostly new staff. For all intensive purposes a completely new school opens up with no relationship to Casa Sula and its history.
For history buffs, interested in going deeper into above timeline, we’ve written in more detail about this history last year in our Issue #2, which you can read here (part 1) and here (part 2).
July, 2024 - Journey San Mateo and Real World School merge
On July 18, all parents of both Journey as well as of Real World School received a very similar letter from their directors, stating that the two schools have decided to combine and that starting in August they will operate as a single school on the campus of Real World School. The school will be led by a combination of Journey and Real World School leaders and the combined set of teachers. The new leadership team consisting of Canel, Simon, Christina, Rob & Carlos has been working together for a few weeks on the transition and will continue to work together to provide the best possible education for our children.
The Parents Reaction
Parents rejoice in such a wonderful news, everyone is happy that there will be more kids in the combined school and that the combined school will be better resourced with complimentary talents in the leadership team. Parents of each schools invite each other for dinners, kids form instant bonds, circles are formed, songs are sang. The future for our children could not be brighter!
Except, that’s not exactly the parents reaction. A more objective way to relay the response from parents is to say that it was “mixed”. Specifically the RWS parents, most of whom have only been there since January are mostly happy. “More kids? More teachers? Same wonderful philosophy and education approach? Certification? Sounds good to us!”. The Journey parents reaction on the other hand is a bit less uniform and ranges from “I guess this could be a positive thing, but lets see how it unfolds” to “Wait a minute, how come nobody asked me about this merger?” to straight down hostile “Stop the bus! Do not merge! Keep things as they are! I have demands!”.
A series of meetings, both virtual as well as in-person took place over the course of past week in order to start building trust, answer open questions and start building new common culture and a common understanding of how this will actually work in practice.
Objective Analysis
When two institutions of any kind merge, there are incentives on both sides of the merger. Both schools are relatively new and are still in their “growth” stages. RWS is the newer of the two and is the smaller one, but one that is better financially resourced. The motivation for it are pretty clear, you need more kids in the school in order for school to work, you also need certifications for older kids so that they can go into universities upon graduation should they choose to do so. Journey offered both of these and more(teachers, experience, administrative strength, etc). For Journey, the incentive is to align with a well resourced school, get access to leadership team and world-class teachers and to grow together, instead of competing for the same kids, thus allowing everyone to focus on the education and less on marketing / competitive strategies of attracting students. As always, there are personal reasons and financial incentives at play as well, but we won’t get into them here, suffice to say that they are secondary.
We can probably simplify this analysis even further: the market size is just too small. There are 100 or so kids in the combined school. 100 kids across all age groups is just too small of a number to have two similar-enough schools operating in parallel. It just doesn’t make business sense and so the schools did the obvious thing and merged. Its important to emphasize the “similar-enough” point, while these two schools are certainly not identical, they are both trying to focus on Social-Emotional Learning combined with Project-Based Learning. How they achieve those broad objectives differs and they each have their own methodology, at the end they are still catering to the same parents and children providing a similar “educational product”.
Opinionated Analysis
Bias disclosure: I am a parent of two RWS kids. I’ve been a parent with that same school when it was still Casa Sula for 3 years now and have seen the last 3 year history. I was also part of the group of parents who went to Journey Tamarindo 2 years ago in order to see if its a school we would want to start here in San Mateo.
First, lets get the obvious out of the way. The fact that these two schools decided to combine and have not given their parents a heads up, socializing it with just a few parents and then announced it after the fact is a misstep. You want to do a big change, one thing you usually want to do is engage your key constituents before you make the big change in order to gauge their reaction and prepare them for the change you are about to make, ideally bringing them along for the ride. When you skip that step, you get the reaction that we’ve now observed and you are forced to deal with it after the fact. It erodes some trust and so now you have to work to re-gain it. Luckily thats exactly what the combined leadership have been doing - re-gaining trust.
While its easy to criticize this approach, its important to acknowledge that there are likely factors beyond our knowledge that led to the timing and sequencing. The intentions of everyone involved as far as I could tell is to provide the best possible education to our children. All the key leaders including Canel, Simon, Christina and Carlos have their own children in the school. So I do think some slack should be given to them.
Finally, there is a boundary that should be defined more clearly between school owners, staff and parents. Specifically there is an idea, that is prevalent in the valley more than in other places in the world. The idea that this is “our” school and that we(parents) have certain rights with respect to the future of the school and how things get done. While there is certainly some truth to this and both schools as well as the new combined school will continue to seek input from parents on the educational approach and other school-related activities, there is also a set of responsibilities and decision making that the school itself reserves for itself and will act in accordance to its interests, best that these boundaries are defined upfront so that there is no surprises later.
So then it’s smooth sailing from here on? May be! In about 2 weeks, we’re going to have a school with anywhere from 100 - 120 children, many of whom will be meeting each other for the first time and 17 teachers, on a campus that has not had this many children before, run by a leadership team that has started working together relatively recently, with a set of highly opinionated and engaged parents. When you add all these ingredients up, you can be sure that it will take a bit of time to reach a new equilibrium.
Yet, there is plenty of reasons to be very optimistic. Canel, Simon, Christina, Carlos, Rob & Brian are highly capable individuals with serious educational, team building and business backgrounds with ambitions to create a truly world-class school that can be an example model for the rest of the world. A truly hefty and worthy goal!
Moreover, combined schools, means combined parent bodies. Suddenly a large number of parents who otherwise did not have a strong reason to interact with each other, will find themselves in the same school and all kind of new connections will be made that will surely lead to a stronger community with stronger bonds and I for one am excited as to what will unfold.
The main question that I think we as parents should be asking ourselves is how we can be as helpful as possible in this process, trying to stay curious about everyone’s perspectives, develop enough gratitude and empathy so that when triggering events do occur, as I’m sure they will, we can still move through them together, mindfully and with support for one another, for our children and for the school staff.