Escola Eleva plans to open a unit in SP in 2024 – 06/30/2023 – Education

With an estimated investment of BRL 100 million, Escola Eleva plans to open its first unit in the city of São Paulo in February 2024. The objective, according to the institution, is to train generations of leaders who will make an impact on society. The monthly fee will be around R$ 8,000.

The bilingual premium school originates from Rio de Janeiro, where it has three units — there are also others in Brasília and Recife.

Until May last year, the group belonged to asset manager Gera Capital, which had businessman Jorge Paulo Lemann as one of the largest shareholders, when it was bought by Inspired Education for R$ 2 billion. This English group has more than 80 premium schools in the world.

The São Paulo unit will operate in the former headquarters of the Institute of Fine Arts, in Vila Mariana, in the south zone.

According to Eleva, the building, from the 1920s, was renovated with a project signed by the Danish architect Rosan Bosch, known for works developed for the construction of educational spaces, and by the Brazilian Miguel Pinto Guimarães, who designed the other schools in the group.

Marcio Cohen, founder of Eleva and CEO of Inspired Education in Brazil, says that opening a school in São Paulo had been in the plans since 2018, when the number of students enrolled at the unit in Botafogo (RJ) jumped from 400 to more than 1,000 in the second year after opening.

But finding a place with a structure in line with the school’s standards, with plenty of open space, in a region where there are families that can migrate their children there, was the biggest challenge. The Covid-19 pandemic also contributed to putting a brake on plans.

The Belas Artes building, according to the executive, can accommodate about a thousand students, however, the idea is to open it next year with a maximum of 300 students enrolled.

According to Lucy Nunes, who will be at the head of the São Paulo unit, Eleva will initially offer enrollments from kindergarten three (for three-year-olds) to eighth grade (13 years old), full-time. Gradually, the goal is to reach the conclusion of high school.

And there are interested parents, eight months before the start of classes. “Today [sexta, 30]we had two meetings [com famílias] and next week we have seven more scheduled. We already have pre-enrolled students”, says Nunes, who was director for seven years at the American school Chapel, which has a unit in São Paulo.

In conversations, the school’s governing body warns that fluency in English is a must, not an option, for those who will study there.

“We have the same number of classes, works and presentations in English as in Portuguese. And there are classes that are only in English”, says Nunes. “Therefore, the older student needs to have some level [da língua inglesa] to get in,” adds Choen.

In the first two years, practically only English is spoken, because of the ease of assimilation of the children. In kindergarten five, literacy first occurs in Portuguese and then in English.

Claiming to believe in the importance of the mother tongue and Brazilian culture as essential for building the students’ personal and cultural identity, the management states that the two languages ​​are not practiced at the same time and that the school has a pedagogical model based on active methodology , with spaced moments for the child to move, talk and engage pedagogically.

According to Choen, one of the founders of the school in 2017, the São Paulo unit may have some characteristics of its own when compared to other states. He mentions, for example, the greater interest in São Paulo by universities such as USP and Unicamp, which adopt a completely different model from the Enem (National High School Examination) in their entrance exams.

With a discourse of paying salaries that are at the top of the market, Eleva is now starting to look for teachers, including in the competition, to form the teaching team, which will only be defined in January.

“We are identifying who are the rare gems, talking to families from other schools, mapping the region”, says the CEO.