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Alexey Babetov and wife Maria Kaluzhskaya, both Open World alumni, share their best marketing practices at the September alumni workshop on "Social Marketing and Social Management in the Work of Local Governments" held in Tyumen.
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In October 2001, messages appeared in Yekaterinburg's newspapers, during TV and radio shows, and even on street banners — messages that congratulated the Koriphey Lyceum on its 10th anniversary.
The Koriphey Lyceum — a Yekaterinburg private school — and its successful 10th anniversary promotional campaign were the creation of Open World 2002 alumni Alexey Babetov and Maria Kaluzhskaya, a husband and wife team of enterprising educators. The couple shared their story and their marketing strategy at Open World's September alumni workshop in Tyumen.
Babetov and Kaluzhskaya's foray into education began when they were looking for a preschool for their son. Not finding anything satisfactory, the couple set up their own part-time school with some other parents. They named the preschool the Philipok Center, after the title character in a popular Tolstoy children's story about a little boy eager to go to school despite his young age.
Year by year, the center added courses and grade levels, and developed, almost by accident, into a full-fledged school. Eventually, two buildings were acquired to house a preschool and lyceum. "We got the bigger building in terrible condition and have been renovating it step by step for the last nine years," Kaluzhskaya told Open World In Action. They named the upper school the Koriphey (Leading Light) Lyceum, and adopted as its logo a drawing of a bespectacled youth toting a briefcase — sort of a teenaged version of Philipok. Together, the preschool and lyceum now serve 435 students ages three to 17.
These days the Koriphey Lyceum receives financial support from the city, but parents still finance about 80 percent of the school. Asked why families are willing to pay to send their children to his institution, Babetov, the director, credits the school's outstanding teachers and administrators as well as a unique educational approach. Classes are small, averaging 16-18 children, and teachers go as far as St. Petersburg for educational training. Babetov says, "We strive to combine the best ... of both Russian and Western education standards. We don't want our students merely to memorize things. We want them to think creatively, have their own opinions and be able to stand their ground."
As curriculum director, Kaluzhskaya is the one who puts these principles into practice. Two new components to the school's curriculum — community service and leadership — are ideas that she brought back from her Open World visit, hosted by Friendship Force International in Atlanta. Kaluzhskaya also thanks Open World for giving her new ideas for the future direction of her work. The time she spent at a large Marietta, GA, high school, encouraged her to consider setting up "not a proper high school, but something similar." As she explains, "When children of all ages are all in one place, it is not very interesting for the senior student. They need a wider scope and new opportunities. There should be more senior student classes so that teenagers will have their own community, their own world."
What most impressed Babetov during his Open World visit (hosted by the National Peace Foundation and Plattsburgh State University in New York) was the fact that classes were conducted as discussions, rather than lectures, and the availability of teacher's guides, which are uncommon in Russia. He was also struck by seeing young elementary students learning to type, a practice the lyceum has since introduced for fifth-graders.
The innovative lyceum boasts an award-winning website, www.koriphey.ru, which is updated daily by students and adults working in the onsite media center. The site currently features a story on the Class of 2004, the Koriphey Lyceum's first graduates, who half-seriously lobbied Babetov and Kaluzhskaya to add another grade level so they could stay at their beloved school.
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