Origin Story

Sixty years ago

San Francisco’s French-American Bilingual School was founded in 1962. The visionary founders—fierce Francophiles all—were of their historic moment. Cold War tensions and culture wars loomed. As the tumultuous and divisive 1960s were unfolding, they responded with a vision for a better world.

This brief history is being written to celebrate the school’s sixtieth anniversary, the sexagennial. In the spirit of historical storytellers from Herodotus to Hilary Mantel, we will examine the threads of extant evidence and craft a coherent story. The further we look back, the thinner the school’s documentary archive; and rarer, more blurry, the black and white photographic record. Despite the evidence being misty and elusive in places, it will suffice. So let us plunge in. With a critical eye, and with genuine affection, we will attempt to contextual- ize and reanimate the origin story of French American + International.

The founders had a particular flavor of education in mind. They desired more academic rigor, and a touch more critical thinking than was locally available at the time. They also wanted an education of and about the entire world; one not blinkered by a singular perspective. And they wanted to instill these habits of mind and heart early, beginning with young children. These were the fundamentals—the institutional leitmotifs. We will encounter them repeatedly as the plot of this narrative unrolls. For now, let’s take a fantastical leap through time’s wormhole and look back at the historical context for starting the school.

The year was 1962: The Cuban Missile Crisis, served up with hubris and folly by Kruschev and Kennedy, plunged the world into 35 days of existential terror. France ended the Algerian War and 130 years of colonial rule with the Évian Accords. That same year also saw the first deployment of napalm during the Vietnam War, the execution of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in Israel, and the formal abolition of slavery in Saudi Arabia.

Buttressed by recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions that moved towards legitimizing integration, and inspired by the Little Rock Nine and the freedom riders, James Meredith became the first black student to enroll successfully at the University of Mississippi. A violent mass riot ensued. In the aftermath, Meredith needed ongoing protection by U.S. Marshals.

The year also provided uplifting moments. In 1962, John Glenn overcame extreme g-force and orbited the Earth in a tiny space capsule called Friendship 7. Albert Sabin refused to patent his polio vaccine, thus making it universally available (and a favorite of young children since it was administered on a cube of white sugar). Ra- chel Carson published Silent Spring, her landmark book that exposed the hazards of the DDT pesticide and inspired global environmental movements. John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and shared the stage with James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins, who had proposed a model for base pair replication and a helical structure for DNA. Their discovery—hinging on an X-ray crystallography of Rosalind Franklin (who could not be awarded a Nobel posthumously)—revolutionized molecular genetics. Closer to home, César Chávez and Dolores Huerta created the United Farm Workers Association in California; and across the Golden Gate Bridge in Marin, the Point Reyes National Seashore was established.

There were bittersweet and ephemeral moments in popular culture too. Jackie Robinson was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Marilyn Monroe sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” to John F. Kennedy at Madison Square Garden. West Side Story won ten Oscars, including Best Motion Picture. Bob Dylan performed “Blowin’ in the Wind” on stage for the first time, and Ringo Starr joined The Beatles. The Golden State Warriors played their first game at the Cow Palace, and the Giants made it to the World Series, a feat they would not repeat until 1989.

Having immersed ourselves fleetingly in temporality; the French-American Bilingual School origin story can now be unfurled. On Valentine’s Day 1962, the nine founders of San Francisco’s first independent bilingual school gathered to map out how they were going to implement their radical vision. They believed that a bilingual education in French, beginning at a very early age, would imbue children with an international perspective, and a rigorous academic curriculum would prepare them to make a difference in the world.

The French-American Bilingual School (FABS) opened in the fall of 1963 at 24 Homewood Terrace in San Francisco, with 23 students in a single mixed-age basement classroom. Jeannette Rouger was the founding Head of School.

A fond look back

In 2012, veteran teacher, parent, and Admission Director Dan Harder wrote A Look Back in celebration of the school’s 50th Anniversary. Dan wove a compelling narrative. He leaned heavily on primary source conversations with the founding administrators, teachers, and Board members, as well as current students and proud alums.

In A Look Back, recurring themes emerge. Foremost is the tenacious unassailability of the school’s founding principles. This is a signature characteristic that persists today. Inextricably bound to the original core values is the enduring French and American bilingual immersion program.

For the duration of the startup, it-takes-a-village, formative years of the school, there was no formal mission.

The school very much defined itself by what it taught. The what, why, and how of the curriculum was always front and center. To a large extent, this is still true today. In this third decade of the third millennium, the school’s Leadership Team and Board of Trustees still refer to the student learning experience as “the business of the business.”

Other emergent school themes reflected in A Look Back were operational rather than visionary. They can be characterized as steady growth, mounting debt, and a finger-wagging imperative for an ever larger facility. There were scary moments along the way, including some just-in-time, short-term improvisations; but as we shall see, the founding Board members prevailed.

Internal unrest

It was 1967, and while The Summer of Love was flourishing in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, The French-American Bilingual School was experiencing its own counterculture movement. Internal turmoil was brewing and the school would not emerge unscathed.

There was a growing crisis of identity around what the community cared about most—the precise balance between French and American manifested in its revered taught curriculum. To cut an angst-filled saga short, a significant minority in the community preferred a completely French school. They galvanized and resolved to split away. La Petite École Française à l’Étranger emerged from the furor. This small, breakaway school would grow steadily, and in 1974 would metamorphose to Lycée Français International La Pérouse. In 2012, it was relaunched as the Lycée Français de San Francisco.

The schism was existential and painful but, in the long term, proved beneficial to both schools. Board Chair Jim McClatchy noted at the time, “we were fighting constantly about our identity until we split. After that, they had their thing and we had ours.”

After five years of navigating growing pains, dissent, and uncertainty, harmony was restored at the French-American Bilingual School. The school relocated to 940 Grove Street, a spacious Victorian house off Alamo Square, and opened with 126 students. The game was on!

Two windows to the world

There were now two competing French schools in San Francisco. The French-American Bilingual School was careful to differentiate itself. At FABS, the French educational experience would benefit from a more eclectic and more international parent community than the rival school that was catering to a mostly French national expat crowd. Inextricable from the French-American Bilingual School’s demographic profile were its first overt conversations and positive school culture shifts around diversity and inclusion.

The structure of the bilingual journey was also evolving. FABS adopted a balanced approach to bilingual immersion using the research-based Canadian model. When children start language immersion early, they gain fluency and literacy in French at no apparent cost to their English academic skills. They hear French phonemes perfectly and articulate them like natives. Given the right setting, the second language comes as a “freebie,” in the sense that children acquire it by living it. The 80% French immersion adopted by the school worked better than a 100% sink or swim approach thanks to the natural transfer of competencies between languages. A synergistic transfer between English and French continues throughout the bilingual journey. For upper elementary students, the school decided to shift from 80% immersion to around 50% to build high levels of literacy in both languages.

Everytime a FABS child entered their French classroom it was as if they had stepped into France. In an optimal, authentic setting they experienced undiluted French language and pedagogy. In the school at large, a critical mass of two distinct cultures side-by-side ensured a healthy, creative tension—an ongoing dialectic. Through their bilingualism, even the youngest children were developing an appreciation that each of their languages carried with it a certain way of thinking and being.

The pedagogical movers and shakers of French-American Bilingual School were well aware that achieving high-functioning academic literacy in two languages takes time. It is an intricate journey—one that is only fully consolidated in young adulthood. The result is priceless. Students obtain the gift of two cognitive windows to the world.

FABS graduates would be primed for working collaboratively and purposefully with people from different cultural, linguistic, and racial backgrounds. This is empowering—even thrilling—but above all, it goes back to the unassailable founding vision of educating students to make a better world.

It would be hard to understate the urgency for this back in 1968. There was the May ’68 civil unrest in France; the Prague Spring; both the My Lai Massacre and Tet Offensive in Vietnam; Lyndon Johnsons’s landmark Civil Rights Act, Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their gloved fists in a Black Power salute at the Mexico City Olympics; and the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy. None of this would be redeemed by Richard Nixon being elected as president.