Growth

UC Extension

Fast forward to 1978. FABS moved to the University of California Extension at 220 Buchanan Street in the Lower Haight neighborhood. That same year, the school formally established its High School, and the Board moved to adopt the International Baccalaureate. It would be only the fourth IB school in the United States and the first on the West Coast to do so. By offering the IB Diploma, the school could now provide a high school program for non-bilingual students entering Grade 9.

Head of School Bernard Ivaldi had been working hard to consolidate the legitimacy of the school’s French program. Ivaldi had engineered initial recognition for the school by the French Ministry of Education as early as 1972. At first, the French Baccalauréat was offered by correspondence. By 1980, Ivaldi’s efforts finally paid off when FABS was authorized by the French Ministry of Education to offer the full French Baccalauréat program onsite. That same year, the High School was proud to graduate its first class of seven students, holding the ceremony at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum.

Sans frontières

In 1984, the school changed its name from French-American Bilingual School to French-American International School (FAIS). The name in French was Lycée International Franco-Américain (LIFA).

During the Buchanan years, the extracurricular offerings at the school burgeoned. Along with Spanish-style architecture, a flock of raucous parrots, and a 1934 New Deal social realist mural, the school now boasted a gymnasium and small theater. Soon competitive athletics and the Back à Dos theater ensemble became cherished aspects of student life, and helped define the spirit and soul of the school. The school's Global Travel program was to provide yet another opportunity for students to learn and feel a sense of belonging beyond the classroom. In April 1986, Grade 8 students took part in the school’s first Paris exchange program.

In 1989, Bernard Ivaldi’s energetic headship ended, but not before the French-American International School school was granted accreditation for its full program— Maternelle à Terminale—by the French Ministry of Education.

Closing out the decade, 1989 was another landmark year globally. The Berlin Wall came down and Mikhail Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush met to orchestrate the end of the Cold War; the student protests in Tiananmen Square were crushed by violent military force; and Alaska’s Prince William Sound was horribly polluted by the Exxon Valdez oil spill. A brochure titled Understanding

AIDS had recently been mailed to every household in the United States. In the Bay Area, the 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake struck.

Ncis

When the French-American International School opened in the fall of 1990, PreK-12 enrollment had reached 500 students. The school was flourishing, but it was plain for all to see that it had outgrown its current site. What happened next was extraordinary!

An unprecedented partnership was forged between FAIS and the Chinese American International School with the aim of locating and developing a permanent home for both schools.

CAIS was a smaller operation than FAIS, but it had also grown rapidly and was in dire need of a larger facility. CAIS was the nation’s pioneer Mandarin immersion school. Both FAIS and CAIS embraced similar educational philosophies but experienced very little overlap in enrollment demographics. This combination of shared values, genuine collegiality at the leadership level, and almost zero rivalry proved extremely fortuitous. The Heads and their respective Trustees spearheaded an innovative solution to allow the schools to collaborate on the planning and funding of a new (and as yet hypothetical) building project. A formal rapprochement would allow them to punch far above their weight and be bolder in their vision than they ever could be as individual schools.

They set up a separate nonprofit corporation with its own governance consisting of Trustees from both schools. The National Center for International Schools (NCIS) was established in September of 1992 with the aim of locating and developing a permanent home for both FAIS and the Chinese American International School. It would take five more years of bold Head of School leadership and Board-driven, detailed machinations before this project came to fruition.

As the umbrella organization, NCIS would effectively own campus properties and lease the space back to the two schools. NCIS would also provide for the operating needs of the schools, including construction management, emergency planning, security and traffic oversight, maintenance, and janitorial needs.

Mission-driven

FAIS, as the school was now referred to colloquially, continued to mature and evolve. The school’s unassailable core values had certainly informed all aspects of the institution, but curiously, these had never been formally defined. The time had come for the school to consolidate and clarify its mission. The 1993 iteration was a noble first effort, but was excessively, long-winded—descriptive rather than aspirational. Only in 1999 was it distilled into the succinct, poetic, venerable version still used today.