This is how it all started
It all started with a friendly discussion in the spring of 2015. There were seven of them, yet they all meant well. They were dreaming about establishing a school for their own children. And soon enough, they found themselves planning the school system of the future. Roszik Linda, the founder of Mamakör (Mom Circle), and Tesfay Sába, a cultural anthropologist, both set out to understand family and communities. Pozna Anita brought her ideas as an architect integrating the values of nature. Halácsy Péter and Somlai Fischer Ádám, the co-founders of Prezi, were experienced in building a start-up company from the basics. Halmos Ádám, the co-founder of Libri Publishing Group, witnesses the birth of books from the ideas until fruition every day. Vészi Gábor helped Facebook as a manager by showing teams not only how to be efficient but to be happy and improve in the meantime.
Establishing a new learning system
Design
Values
The school of the 21st Century
While playing their freshly invented game, they relived everything that the joy of learning meant to them. A few months later, they asked in a Facebook post if anyone was interested in the school, and since there were several hundred people saying yes, Budapest School started its first two learning groups with six teachers in September 2015. A lot has changed since then, but the joy of learning and exploration, the willingness to go and keep trying together still serve as the foundations for Budapest School.
The team - This is how we work today
The founders of Budapest School, namely Halácsy Péter, Halmos Ádám, and Vészi Gábor, decided in September 2018 to establish the Budapest School Lab. The primary goal of this workshop was to promote the establishment of new educational institutions in line with the school's core values, all the while ensuring a stable and sustainable environment where teachers and students can grow together.
Following the establishment of the lab, the Budapest School began to evolve into an organization dedicated to achieving the status of a state-recognized school. During this period, the Budapest School Model was developed, with the support of a select group of investors. Finding a balance between our innovative educational ideas and state regulations was a challenging task, but we managed to overcome these challenges and meet the necessary requirements. Our efforts culminated in 2020 when we officially began operating as a recognized school. Since then, we have been continuously expanding, and currently, we operate in 16 locations with more than 800 families as members, jointly building the Budapest School community.
Halácsy Péter is the face and soul of Budapest School; both his daughter and son go to Breznó school. A proud engineer and feminist, he thinks the key to learning is to believe that we can improve in anything that is important to us. He has been the driving force of Budapest School’s organization since the beginning. Apart from community learning, he is interested in the solitude offered by programming, and in the waves of Lake Balaton. His greatest success besides Budapest School was being the co-founder of Prezi, but he also co-founded Kitchen Budapest and the Heroes’ Square civil organization, among others.
Halmos Ádám is a co-founder of Budapest School; his daughter has been going to P10 in Újlipótváros since the beginning. One of his main reasons for establishing the school was that he wished to travel freely with his family whenever they wanted to. One of his greatest challenges today is that his daughter loves her school so much that she does not want to be absent at all. He is working as the lead publisher at Libri Publishing Group, and whenever he is not daydreaming about a new book, he enjoys going for walks in the forest or writing a curriculum for fun.
Vészi Gábor is a co-founder of Budapest School and the operative leader of Budapest School Lab. An engineer, he started his career as a programmer, then later realized that if he combined this knowledge with people skills, he would be able to balance human, business, and professional standpoints by supporting the teams working together. He maintains this harmony by constantly watching online videos and reading the latest professional textbooks. He is using what he practiced as one of the lead engineers at Prezi and Facebook, and develops it further alongside Budapest School Lab. As soon as he understands a process, he automatizes and customizes. He even holds meetings with the word processing software programmed by himself.