[Music]

Sara Marinelli (00:05):

I am Sara Marinelli, and this is Letters to Italy. In this series, I speak with Italian expats in the Bay Area at the time of Coronavirus. How has the pandemic reshaped our lives here and our relationship to Italy? If there has ever been a time to look back on our choices and ask the question “Where is home?" It is now.

This second episode features Valentina Inbeni, founder and head of La Scuola, an Italian American school from pre-K to eighth grade in San Francisco. 

Valentina is originally from Modena, grew up in Bologna, and moved to San Francisco 20 years ago. The school follows the Reggio Emilia approach to education, and despite its Italian leadership and staff, it's an international community.

After the first lock down and in the second wave of the pandemic, La Scuola was one of the first independent schools in the city to reopen.

Valentina Imbeni (01:17):
I started La Scuola, I'm I'm the founding head of school, and I started it in 2007. I came to California as a researcher in biomedical engineering and material science. I was working at UC Berkeley and I always valued education. And I realized there was no Italian immersion program west of New York. And in a place like the Bay Area and a city like San Francisco with so much Italian-American history, it seemed like a shame. We had a French school, a German school, Chinese. So many languages taught in the city of San Francisco except Italian.
This is a city that was partially started by Italians. The Italians that came here were adventurous. First and foremost, they came in the gold rush period. 
I think this is a place when new things happen and where like material science and engineering major can start a school.
Like all beautiful projects and dreams, you need a group of people that believe in it. And there was a core group of people and board members. We started in, uh, an annex of a church in Potrero Hill, um, basically a one-room school. And then we moved to our first campus in 2010 with 60 students. And now we are on three campuses, pre-K eight with over 300 students going  to 450.

Only 25% of our students have any Italian speaker at home or an Italian parent. We do have quite a large group of Italian Americans, but we have over 30 languages spoken in the rooms of La Scuola. And so I think it's a very international community, and it follows both the American curriculum and the Programmi ministeriali. And also we are an international baccalaureate accredited school. And so we also follow the IB curriculum framework.

[SFX: schools sounds, kids] 

The Reggio Emilia approach is built on this idea of constructing knowledge with the student, and the students are truly the protagonist of their own learning process. Educators are there to facilitate, and that is kind of a shift from teaching to learning

[SFX: schools sounds, kids]

Sara Marinelli (04:19):
Being an educator myself, I am inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach of taking risks in learning and turning mistakes into pedagogical opportunities. I am well aware of the challenges of remote teaching, which we educators had to learn in a week or so at the onset of the pandemic. But I can hardly imagine the many decisions the Head of a school must take at an even faster pace in order to make the switch happen. I asked Valentina what kinds of risks and decisions she had to take on.

Valentina Imbeni (04:57):
Initially when this started to happen back in March, for us Italians we could all see what was happening in Italy. We were a lot more aware than some of our fellow citizens and even my colleagues, you know, heads of other independent schools, many of them just continued to believe that: “okay, this is happening over there. This is not affecting us.” I don't think they saw it coming as much as we did. So in February, I was already looking at this and thinking about when, not if, when it will come to the United States. I think that really helped me psychologically. I think I had more time to prepare. The challenge was to prepare people, the people around me without causing panic, to carry my own community with so many different needs. You know, the parents’ needs, the faculty had needs. And when we eventually had to make the decision to close the school, we also had to switch to a completely different way of teaching and learning like over a weekend. We closed on March 17th. This is when we called closure. And eventually this is when also the city of San Francisco then announced the lockdown

[SFX: News bites ] (06:20):

“My fellow San Franciscans, the new public health order that we're announcing will require San Franciscans to remain at home for your safety and the safety of those around you. This will go into effect through April 7th.”

Valentina Imbeni (06:38):
Basically, we closed on Friday and by Tuesday we were up and running with remote learning. It was very, very stressful for the teachers moving from like a daily connection with the students to being behind the screen. Teachers tried to keep the richness of the curriculum and the challenge was the hands-on activities that were difficult to implement on Zoom. I think the teachers tried very hard to do that with manipulatives that they had, sending materials home, and for the little ones, anything from puppet shows music to using art as a way of connecting.

[SFX: school children singing] (07:24):

Valentina Imbeni (07:25):
I started to send an update every week. The first update I sent was, you know, in the grim days of like, “This is the lockdown,” it just felt it was so hard finding the world. And then my 16 year old, my oldest Stefano, just came up to me and said “Mom, you know, who reads email anymore, just do a video.” And then I told my son, “Okay, now you're in charge, given your idea, you'll be the one filming mommy.”

[SFX: Archival recording of VI’s video] (07:55):

Valentina Imbeni (08:04):
So we did this first video and I got this overwhelming response, like, you know, thank you for being there for us. And, and so this is how we have been keeping in touch with our friends,

[SFX: Archival recording of VI’s video]

 (08:23): [SFX: Local news sound bite]

Breaking news: Bay area schools are extending closures until the 1st of May. County health officers and county superintendents have decided together to extend the closures and student dismissals, the closures cover six bay area counties.

Valentina Imbeni (08:42):
It became clear that, you know, we were going to be closed for some time, but then eventually we would be able to reopen. This is when the community starts to split into a very large group of people who wanted to come back to school, and a very small group of people who were just scared. 
So for me, it was interesting to also listen to the conversation in the United States around equity and why schools should not open because of equity and teachers not wanting to come back to school. And the conversation in Europe was exactly the opposite: because of equity, because we want to be an equitable society, we must get kids back in school because in a situation where children are at home, parents who have more means or more flexible jobs, would be able to support the students at home, will be able to pay for a tutor.  
We also have families in our society and even in our school where actually the parents were not able to stay home. You know, if you have delivery people, essential workers who were working during the lockdown. And so I think it was very important for me to remind the community that we're also serving those families and that the students, the children need to be together. This isolation, this being a home, this is not being connected to one another really affected them.

Sara Marinelli (10:09):
What I hear in Valentina's words is the passion and compassion behind her choices and decisions to defend the values and the community she has built. “Educators are also essential workers,” she claimed in the conversations with families and authorities who were against reopening.

Valentina Imbeni (10:30):
The city of San Francisco made it very hard initially for us to open. It was a really difficult process. We had to apply for this waiver. We had to put together a lot of documentation. They kept postponing the waiver. They kept making it harder for private schools to open because they knew that the public schools were not opening. And so we fought really hard to be able to open.  And when the families were seeing this back and forth, when they knew that different States in the U.S. that would open, then they just went there. So it's been really hard. Now we're trying to rebuild enrollment to the best of our ability.

Sara Marinelli (11:12):
Despite the fact that some families were content and others were not, La Scuola’s reopening, with due safety measures and reduced enrollments, occurred in August, 2020, starting with preschool and higher grades following in September and October.
Like me, Valentina did not visit Italy throughout the year and longed to be there during the crisis.

Valentina Imbeni (11:37):
It was very hard not to be able to go home. Many of our faculty members have not been home since last Christmas. And some of them are on visas, which means now with the new regulations, they also cannot leave the country because if they leave the United States, even though they have a valid visa, they cannot come back. It was very hard to hear the really sad news from Italy and the daily death toll.  And it was hard because we were all worried about our families and friends. We all have, you know, like older parents and uncles and aunts and their parents, and most of my family and many friends as well are in Bologna. The region of Emilia-Romagna was one of the regions that was hit hard by, COVID not quite as hard as Lombardia. So I wanted to be back and support the people who were suffering there.

I think for all of us, including myself, I've been in the United States for 20 years and I've always gone back to Italy at least once a year, sometimes more, and not just me, me and my family. So it was very important to me also, as I am, I'm raising a family here, that my children spoke Italian, that they kept that deep connection with their heritage and where they're from. 
And I realized that I have been able to live in the United States for so long because I was able to go back every year and recharge, you know,  my “Italianness” by being there.

Sara Marinelli (13:27):
I relate to Valentina’s need to recharge, to reconnect at least once a year. When you live abroad for so long, your sense of identity shifts and expands, but he can also fracture. You end up drawing a partition between past and present. And you look for ways to bridge where you were and where you are, and to keep these aspects of yourself jointed.

Valentina Imbeni (13:54):
I think I will always identify as Italian. When I think of home, I think of Italy. Even though I've been in San Francisco for 20 years, I think I've learned to love Italy, even more, uh, being away from it. I always thought I would go back to Italy one day and I did find myself thinking: Is this the time? Is this the time for me to go back? But what kept me here was La Scuola. There is a community here that needs me and you don't quit when it's hard. You stay when it's hard and you have to be there for your people, your community. And I knew that this would not be the right time for me to go. So I would have gone home, but I couldn't do it just yet. 

In this dark time, when you feel everything is falling to pieces, you feel this darkness creeping over, I often reminded myself the words of Loris Malaguzzi, the founder of the Reggio Emilia approach. He used used to remind everyone around them, that we should never forget to find joy in our lives. He said the words “Niente senza gioia.”  I tried to say that a lot to myself on difficult days, we must find the joy. Even in the small things that we do every day.

Sara Marinelli (15:32):
I reflect on Reggio Emilia's motto “Nothing without joy."  The way Valentina has described the process of working for her school to reopen and serve the community evoked for me a sense of deeper joy: the joy that you cultivate patiently and stubbornly, and that you harvest at the end of a difficult season. 
And all of these efforts, always with half of your heart and mind in Italy.  So I asked Valentina to imagine writing a letter to Italy, to her people far away during the hardest time of the Italian crisis.

Valentina Imbeni (16:13):
I think I would love to tell my fellow Italians:  Cara Italia, be strong, keep thinking that all will be well well. “Andrà tutto bene.” And I know that things now are not looking great and you are tired.  Be patient. I think things will get back there. We know a lot more now about the virus. Continue staying connected to your close ones. The vaccine will come soon and we can all see each other again. 
All of us that are from Italy and cannot come back are missing you so much. We long for home. Our thoughts and hearts are with you.

Sara Marinelli (17:02):
Since we recorded this conversation, Valentina has planned to visit her family and friends in Italy this summer. Since reopening in early fall 2020, La Scuola’s teaching modality has been in person every day, with remote learning to accommodate some family's needs. La Scuola also created a COVID-19 relief fund to support families directly impacted by the pandemic. You can find out more about La Scuola at www.lascuolasf.org.

In the next segment, I continue the conversation on the challenges of directing an education program with Lucina Di Meco, a senior director of girls education and gender equality for an international non-profit called Room to Read. Lucina is also researcher and advocate for women's rights and political leadership. I hope you will join me.

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“Letters to Italy” is produced, edited, and hosted by me, Sara Marinelli.
This series was made possible thanks to the support of COMITES of San Francisco and the Italian Consulate of San Francisco with funding from the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation. I am grateful for their support. 
Thanks for listening.

© Sara Marinelli