A little local perspective. I live in the Twin Cities and ski Welch (Welch, not Welsh) regularly. It is without question the best terrain we have in the Twin Cities. Many of our day ski areas here suffer from very old insfrastructure. Welch has a new chalet, some of the newest lifts around and top notch snow making equipment. Their ski school has it's own building and a nice set-up for never-evers and timid beginners.
Disclaimer: I'm affiliated with one of three Twin Cities based traveling kids ski schools and these schools are all run by PSIA people with plenty of active Ed Staff sprinkled in. Many of those instructors are aware of and understand the value of PMTS methods. My ski school has an annual enrollment of about 750 kids.
In my experience, ski students in this area take a similar path. Parents often provide for lessons until children are competent to ski on their own (basic parallel skiing) and then there are often two forks in the road. If the child takes Path A, they end up focusing on free skiing or succumb to the draw of the terrain park. Path B leads the student to an adolescence of running gates. Race training is big here. On Path B, as much time is spent on race training and technique as is general ski instruction. The kids in the race programs are die hard snow sports fans. Watching them bang gates and ride super fast rope tows until 10pm week nights at Buck Hill when the temps are below zero gives me respect for their desire to slide.
Welch has a good pool of dedicated instructors and while it make take them time to get fully fluent with their new program focus, I'm sure they'll do well. I don't think it will make a big difference in their overall number of lessons sold in a given year. There's a lot of history in ski schools here and many of them are as much family as they are business.
Skied Welch last Saturday all day in the RAIN.
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