Patti Benvenuti and Gina Furmanick are a mother/daughter team of educators who are launching a new school housed in Oxford’s Zion Lutheran Church. Called the Freedom Academy, it will be an updated version of the one-room schoolhouse with students from ages 4 – 7 years attending for the first year. As students grow older, additional years will be added on, so no one ages out of the school.
Gina was a five year veteran of the Auburn public school system, teaching first grade, when the idea to open her own school hit her.
“Last year, I just didn’t feel the passion that I had felt. And then I thought there was so much about schools as they are that I didn’t agree with and I didn’t like and that I knew could be better,” she said…