French Sabbatical

In early 2010 my wife, Melinda, and I were granted a sabbatical for the 2010/11 school year from Puget Sound Community School (PSCS), the school we had founded in 1994. We had long dreamt about living for a year in France with our daughters, Chloe and Ella. But the challenges, not to mention the incomes, involved in running a small, nonprofit, private school had quietly put those dreams to rest over the years. It wasn’t until spring break in 2009 that Melinda and I started talking seriously about the value our absence would provide not only us but the school.

As founders, we had been involved in every significant decision in the school’s 16 year history. As such, if something suddenly happened to us the school would surely suffer. Dubbed the “pie truck scenario” because Melinda said she’d rather we be run over by a truck carrying pies than by a bus, a board committee came together to discuss a “succession plan,” should something happen to us. The concept of granting us a sabbatical, but doing it in a way that would help the school grow through experiencing our absences without them involving pie trucks, buses, or any other pedestrian-threatening vehicle, was part of that committee’s work.

Come 2010, the full board approved the sabbatical along with a plan to help the school best experience us being away. On July 1, 2010 the sabbatical officially began. And on that day, I began this blog.

This blog became a way for me to share an image and a summary of each of our days while on sabbatical. Its audience was our families back in Seattle, providing them an easy way to see what we were doing. As the months went by, the blog became such a regular part of my day that I didn’t want to stop it once we returned home. I continued to post each day, and have since our return.

To read any of the posts specific to the sabbatical, use the “Blog Archive” and “Search” tools at the bottom of each page. If you want to focus on our year in France, our first full day there was July 6, 2010 and our last day there was July 28, 2011. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them in the relevant “Comments” section. I’ll do my best to reply.