was unequivocal on the subject of mega-schools this week: they simply don't work.

"I am against big schools and I don't think Bermuda should have gone that way,'' Mrs. Christine Gorham Cox, a former student at the Bermuda High School for Girls who was on the Island for a three-day strategy-planning conference with her alma mater , said in reference to the Prospect mega-school.

"Small schools have been proven to be much more successful. You have to know everyone's name.'' While Mrs. Cox, an alumna of both George Washington University and Vassar College, prefaced her remarks by saying that she has been out of touch with Bermudian education policy and did not know the reasons for Government's decision to build the mega-school, she did cite a significant amount of research -- both her own and that of others -- which indicated that a "good'' elementary or high school was more than often a small school.

For the past ten years, Mrs. Cox has been running the prestigious 450-student Gill St. Bernard's preparatory school in Gladstone, New Jersey.

Although it serves as both an elementary and a secondary school, the main goal of Gill St. Bernard's is to prepare young minds for college, which almost all of its students attend.

Married to an American, Mrs. Cox conducted her own research into education policy at Harvard Graduate School.

"There are three things,'' Mrs. Cox told The Royal Gazette , "which the research showed were needed in order to have a good school.

"Two of them,'' she noted, "were a strong school leadership and the involvement of the parents. The third was size -- or small size, particularly (a student body of) under 1,000.'' As a case in point, Mrs. Cox pointed to her own school, which is tailored to gifted students but has also succeeded in fulfilling the personal and academic aspirations of a wide variety of pupils through the flexible and highly varied teaching methods that come with being small.

She also cited BHS -- "I got a fabulous education there'' -- as another "small'' success story, though she noted too that a school doesn't have to be private, as both BHS and Gill St. Bernard's are, to offer quality education.'' "There are a number of inner-city schools (in the US) that are just wonderful,'' Mrs. Cox said. "It all again comes back to the question of dynamic leadership.'' Dynamism, however, tends to be lost or underappreciated in a very large environment, Mrs. Cox pointed out.

And in fact, she said, the phenomenon that saw a large number of mega-schools being constructed in the US in past years is widely being reversed.

"It's being phased out in America,'' Mrs. Cox said of the mega-school philosophy. "Research has found that it contributed to gang warfare and vandalism, to the impersonalisation that has led kids to feel disaffected.'' On the potential affects of a mega-school in Bermuda -- which Mrs. Cox said she always feels "very emotional'' about visiting -- she reiterated that she had no specific knowledge of the system here or of Government's motives.

But on further prodding she noted: "I think it's crazy.'' GETTING THE MESSAGE -- KEMH emergency department unit coordinator Kareen Richards with a revolutionary phone which allows emergency department staff to communicate with deaf callers.