Beware!
Hey pearse.finnegan,
Don't want to scare you, but just a bit of advice which I learned from when I was in the same situation of looking to do my PPL in the USA.
Beware of messages from Pprune which make out that one flying school is the best thing since sliced bread. There can be (not saying there are) messages from people who work there or from people who will get something out of advertising that school.
I'm not saying there isn't a school in the USA which is perfect, but its easy to be lead into thinking one school is brilliant, then you find out it isn't and you've sunk £3k into it.
I think I was a victim to this last year!
But 99.999999% of messages you do recieve will be genuine.
Good luck!
(btw this isn't an attack on pprune, I love pprune and its helped me a GREAT deal and I never ever want to see it go!)
Ian