Change

In April 1994, the NCIS Board bid successfully on the option to purchase the building at 150 Oak Street—the former Caltrans headquarters in San Francisco. The main building occupied an entire city block in the urban Civic Center neighborhood. Though the seven story building was highly functional and seismically sound, the interior was shabby and institutional, and would require millions of dollars to improve it for school functionality and bring it up to ADA compliance.

Emboldened by some major fundraising, a pioneering bond issuance (a first of its kind encompassing two collaborating schools), as well as the expertise of Cahill Contractors and the schools’ architects, NCIS commenced tentative planning and design work, and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved the project. Then as now, French-American International School was the larger partner of the enterprise, with a 74% share of the eventual footprint.

Head of School Jane Camblin

Moving ahead in our timeline, 1994 saw the end of apartheid with election of Nelson Mandela to the South African presidency; the Rwandan genocide; the Ebola virus outbreak; and the 25th Anniversary of Woodstock. In San Francisco, the first observance of World AIDS Day took place at the AIDS Memorial Grove in Golden Gate Park.

When the school year began in the fall of 1994, Jane Camblin had been appointed interim Head of School. Jane would go on to become the school’s longest serving Head to date. Upon assuming the role, she quickly made her mark. Within a year, the Middle School was designated as a separate section with its own Principal. Another early initiative was branding the high school section with a distinct identity, naming it the International High School.

Mission

Guided by the principles of academic rigor and diversity, French American + International offers programs of study in French and English to prepare its graduates for a world in which the ability to think critically and to communicate across cultures is of paramount importance.

Guidé par des principes de rigueur académique et de diversité, le Lycée International Franco-Américain propose des programmes en français et en anglais, pour assurer la réussite de ses diplômés dans un monde dans lequel la pensée critique et la communication interculturelle seront déterminantes.

As the decade unfolded, a new pedagogical theme gained momentum. Technology was being used with greater frequency to support teaching, learning, and school infrastructure. For FAIS, it was also time to publish the school’s first rudimentary website.

Throughout much of her tenure, Jane was supported by Adjoint au Chef d’établissement, Claude Farrugia. Claude was legendary for his tireless promotion and guardianship of all things authentically French. Claude was also an early entrepreneurial mover and shaker in the use of digital technology in schools. He later would introduce coding and tinkering in the Lower School, where he also served as Principal.

Groundbreaking at 150 Oak

Jane Camblin was the driving force behind readying and moving the school into 150 Oak Street. Of critical importance to the NCIS bond fiscal strategy for subsequent years, Jane also delivered on robust enrollment increases. From this position of confidence and strength, she would soon be empowered to manage a series of audacious campus upgrades.

French-American International School moved to the 150 Oak Street campus in October 1997. The move was a Herculean operation, taking place over the course of a long weekend. Furniture, technology, and all manner of educational resources were relocated by a team of efficient movers; 679 students, 90 faculty, and 32 staff followed in their wake.

Jane Camblin and Shirley Lee, the Head of School at Chinese American International School, spoke at the groundbreaking ceremony. At the ribbon cutting, they took the opportunity to celebrate the diversity and abundance of culture and language in their schools, and the great potential inherent at the new campus.

In 2001, the garage next to the gym at 151 Oak Street was demolished to provide extra recreational blacktop space. Soon after, FAIS and CAIS lower school students jointly commemorated United Nations Day with a boisterous Peace Pole ceremony. The wooden pole mounted at the Oak Street entrance was inscribed "May peace reign upon this earth" in French, Chinese, Spanish, and English.

On September 11, 2001, al Qaeda militants hijacked airplanes and crashed them into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan. A third plane hit the Pentagon. The news story broke during the FAIS early morning commute time. When the children left their homes for school that Tuesday morning, it seemed like a routine day. By the time they arrived on campus, their world had changed.

The school’s Leadership Team had to move quickly. Classes were canceled. The crisis situation was announced in section assemblies led by the Principals. High school students and their teachers viewed the harrowing images of the towers collapsing in astonished silence. Since the extent of the attack and identity of the perpetrators were completely unknown during the immediate aftermath, the entire school was evacuated within hours.

40th Anniversary

The 40th Anniversary of the school was celebrated in 2002. Behind the scenes, long-term fiscal sustainability became a Board priority, and all financial expenditures were tightened significantly. In 2004, under the watchful eye of new Board Chair Adam Cioth, school fees were subject to game-changing, one-time increases of 9.7% and 14.9% in the Lower School and High School respectively. The increases proved challenging for many families but were entirely necessary to make the numbers work, and for the first time in the history of the school, build healthy cash flow and reserves.

Call me International

Relations between FAIS and France remained strong. The school now received an annual accreditation called homologation from the Ministry of Education. This affirmation was analogous to the accreditations the school earned as an independent school in North America. In 2002, the school was jointly accredited by the California Association of Independent Schools (CAIS) and the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC). Accreditations entail a self-study report conducted by the school and an assessment visit from an outside group of expert educators.

Head of School Jane Camblin was determined that the school should also adopt a leadership role in the international schools arena. Jane was Chair of the Council of International Schools in the Americas (CIStA) Board, the fastest-growing regional association. As one of the few female Heads during that era, she wryly enjoyed the CIStA/"sister" pun. In 2002, she was also elected to the Council of International Schools Board.

In 2004, the school used digital technology to revolutionize communications and the pedagogical infrastructure. New databases and other software innovations streamlined billing, fundraising, report cards, transcripts, schedules, attendance reporting, and curriculum documentation. There was visual evidence of much new hardware and software around the school, especially in the new computer and science labs.

Athletics blossomed in the new gym and the arts were not neglected. Back à Dos was alive and well. During this era, the black box theater was located on the 6th floor of the school building, where the high school library is located today.

Diversity and Inclusion

The years leading up to the 50th Anniversary sizzled with novelty and adventure. Radical change was afoot in the application of digital technology, especially in the classroom. There was renewed emphasis afoot in other mission-driven educational domains, including but not limited to the importance of the social and emotional well-being of students; stewardship of the planet; and, not least, intense heartfelt conversations around diversity and international mindedness.

A highlight every year—guaranteed to fire up the faculty and staff—was Jane Camblin’s Rentrée speech. The annual address could be relied upon to contain provocative literary and philosophical quotes aligned with snippets from frontier educational research and combined with some unflinching, unapologetic political edge.

Under Jane's watch, it is fair to say that discussions around the principles of diversity tended to emphasize our French and International identity rather than a homegrown, U.S.-centric ethnicity and civil rights approach. Jane also disparaged a “Three Fs” mindset (flags, food, and festivals) which “so often informs the tourist-like encounters with ‘other’ cultures advocated by many monolingual schools.”

The notion of laïcité, which is inextricable from French national identity, was a cultural factor that layered complexity, dissonance, and incommensurability during the school’s early efforts at diversity training for faculty and staff. Amongst other things, laïcité requires that public spaces (including schools) be free of religion. Moreover, being a French citizen supersedes all other aspects of a person’s identity. Through this lens, characteristics like ethnicity and sexual orientation are viewed very much as a private matter.

Yet the fact of the school's U.S. context remained. David Goldberg—FABS alum, Black Student Union founder, and in 2005, the school’s first Computer Science teacher—cautioned at the time, “our students have grown up with the peculiar brand of institutional racism that the United States has fostered (or one of its European analogues). For better or worse, they come to define themselves in a larger context of American class and cultural issues.”

Global Travel Program

Since its inception, the school’s Global Travel Program has provided transformative learning moments for hundreds of students (some as young as ten) and dozens of employees annually. Directeur des Etudes Françaises Jean-Pierre Nagy originated the Global Travel and ex- change programs in 1986. Questions were raised even back then. What can we be thinking? Can we keep doing it? What are the benefits? And can the benefits outweigh health and safety, as well as liability risks?

The easy response—at least for the initiated—was, and still is, that not continuing the Global Travel Program would be difficult to imagine (though today’s trip-planners are ever more conscious of the program’s air travel carbon footprint). Quite simply: there is nothing like being there!

The now-signature Tahiti exchange was the first international trip students took beyond France. A subsequent Global Travel landmark was the first India trip in April 2006. India soon became one of the flagship locations of the program, along with the Galapagos biodiversity field trip, and the service learning and cultural trip to Senegal (in collaboration with École Natangué, our sister school in M’Bour).

The India trip is emblematic of the school's approach to global travel. The trip is reserved for juniors who have the maturity and resilience to transcend the pitfalls of voyeurism and fully benefit from a low-budget, downto-earth, up-close, behind-the-scenes, non-touristic, multi-sensorial, spiritual, life-changing experience.

Children of Haiti Project

A celebrated service initiative involving younger students is the Children of Haiti Project led by Middle School Principal Fabrice Urrizalqui. A school was created just after the 2010 earthquake to welcome mostly orphaned kids who were living in tents. The biggest annual fundraiser for CoHP is our annual Fun Run in Golden Gate Park. Every penny goes straight to the school.

2008 Crash

In 2008, global financial markets crashed. It was the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Market failures, as well as sizable reductions of the bourse scolaire (financial aid program for citizens administered directly by the French government), affected many FAIS families.

The fiscal discipline and fees augmentation adopted in 2004 paid off. The school emerged virtually unscathed from the crash. Families made genuine financial sacrifices to prioritize their children’s independent school education; and the Board approved some judicious extra spending on aid. By the time school opened in the fall it had retained almost all families.

Early Learning

In 2008 the school embraced the full age range scope of French education by recruiting its first PK3 class. The class could have been filled immediately with siblings and faculty children, but spots were also strategically assigned to external candidates who might otherwise have gone to the Lycée Lapérouse.

The “petite section” is much more than high-quality day care. It is the first rung on the French academic ladder. Children transition from the security of the home environment and—in a loving and nurturing environment surrounded by their peers—begin their individual journeys towards autonomie. They have so much to learn. The routine is more flexible, more playful and less structured than PK4 or K. The program is child centered, unhurried, and tailored to each child’s age-appropriate, biological rhythms. The playful activities and transitions are planned with intentionality to gently prime the children for the pre-reading, pre-writing and pre-numeracy skills acquisition that lie ahead.

Obama inauguration

The first inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States and the country’s first Black president was a festive occasion at French American + International. On January 20, 2009, the entire student body–from three-year-olds in the new PK3 class to graduating seniors, several of voting age–were seated to- gether in the Oak Street gymnasium to enjoy the historic happenings. The vibe of a vast crowd at the West Front of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. was captured on a huge screen and a pristine sound system. The upbeat ambiance was astonishing. The ceremony included Obama quoting from the Gettysberg address and Aretha Franklin singing “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”

Swine flu

In a chilling foreshadowing of the all-too-familiar coronavirus that would wreak deadly havoc ten years later, the World Health Organization declared that the H1N1 influenza strain, commonly referred to as "swine flu," had been classified as a global pandemic.

Head of School Jane Camblin acknowledged the severity of the outbreak and pointed out that its epidemiology was enabled by globalization. As the school dutifully followed the recommendations of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, nobody could have envisaged the extent of lockdown constraints and deaths that would later unfold with Covid.

Arts Pavilion

In the fall of 2009, school enrollment surpassed one thousand students. Jane Camblin launched the Capital Campaign for the purchase and renovation of the Dennis Gallagher Arts Pavilion at 66 Page Street, and the associated 150 Oak Street Campus Plus project. The new Arts Pavilion added a much needed extra dimension to the high school campus and subsequently aided recruitment.

The 66 Page building had character and a nostalgic feel. It had been San Francisco’s Harley Davidson dealership. The architects were careful to preserve some of the period signage. The design placed the Music and Film suites at the lower level. Visual Arts were located at ground level. Just after the formal entrance of the building on the

Page Street side, guests were greeted by a spacious gallery space bathed in natural light. A “black box” theater arts center, with charismatic industrial rafters, filled the Upper Level.

Across the street, the 150 Oak Campus Plus Project provided further upgrades to the International High School facility. The entire east wing of the 5th floor was now dedicated to hands-on science. An extra lab was constructed and equipped specifically for biotechnology. On the 6th floor a new high school library and media resource center, with sweeping cityscape views on three sides, was built in the old black box theater space.

Adjoining the library was a new tech lab and college counseling suite. On a large notice board overlooking the cozy student lounge space, a new tradition was born–the placement of college pennants as the year’s acceptances rolled in.

Modern Learning

Beginning in 2011, with high school teachers creating video lectures, and Grade 7 students equipped with iPads, French American + International had piloted a set of initiatives, introducing new technologies and innovative strategies to modernize the teaching and learning in its classrooms. Looking back, with the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to lampoon the ephemeral nomenclature and succession of buzzwords associated with this liminal revolutionary era. The vernacular included: “Modern Learning,” “21st Century Learning,” “Blended Learning,” and the “Flipped Classroom.”

There were downsides and gaffes as well as the obvious net gains associated with introducing digital technologies. For example, sending middle school students home with unrestricted iPads supplied by the school was a point of concern for many parents.

Despite some initial unforeseen consequences, digital technology was catalyzing pedagogical thinking. Emerging debates about Modern Learning were in essence a continuation of the discourse unleashed by the school’s founders.

At French American + International “Modern Learning” became a much bigger concept than bringing digital toys to the classroom. It was framed as mission-driven and aligned with yet another cognitive revolution–frontier neuroscience.

The teaching and learning landscape was shifting. The role of the teacher was changing. Pedagogy was becoming increasingly constructivist and student-centered. Differentiation, and the critical importance of teachers getting to know the social and emotional dispositions and individual learning modalities of each and every student in the class, became the go-to indicators of best practice.

The pedagogical movers and shakers at French American + International defined blended learning as combining the best of traditional practices with risk-taking, innovative approaches utilizing new technologies. In the High School, teachers were encouraged to adopt an entrepreneurial approach to new technologies. Jane Camblin had encouraged the Upper School Principals and other lead educators to keep the Board of Trustees apprised about the use of digital technology in the classroom. Board Chair Tex Schenkkan referred to these radical applications as “cutting edge, not bleeding edge.”

Before long Jane took the academic technology team on the road. With resplendent new playthings, including Prezi, interactive SMART Boards, and Screencast-O-Matic, they presented to audiences of international school Heads at CIS and other conferences in Brazil, Qatar, Singapore, Denmark, and Nice.

Information literacy and digital citizenship arose as necessary and enduring skills that would prepare students for an increasingly high-paced, ultra-connected world. Age-appropriately students were asked to reflect upon their own digital footprint, and the potential pitfalls of negative habits online. This was all new; and it is fair to say that educators were navigating the changes alongside their students.

Teaching and learning was becoming ever more handson, creative, and collaborative. Neuroscience affirmed that social-emotional well-being was at one with optimal learning. Teachers were aware that the one doing the talking was the one doing the learning.

After initial flirtations with more or less universal iPad implementation, French American and International teachers soon recognized the limitations of the platform. As things settled, especially for the younger children, devices were used only when they added particular value to learning. iPads came out for discrete chunks of time for carefully selected class activities and projects.

In the Lower School, the blend of old and new was exemplified by the introduction of robotics and an hour of code balanced by the new daily ritual of “Drop Everything And Read”–a real physical book, of course!

Board Chair Josh Nossiter viewed a good book as “the ultimate search engine! It may lack tech wizardry, but it remains practical and low maintenance, it doesn't even require batteries.”

Athletics

Interscholastic athletics has always been a memorable aspect of student life at French American and International. Alumni reflect fondly on the Buchanan campus era. Participation was great fun, but modest school enrollment meant that the small number of teams had to scramble for players. The gym was serviceable but had little room for spectators, and winning results were sporadic at best.

Everything changed after the move to 150 Oak. The program benefited from a succession of talented Athletics Directors, increased participation from a much larger student body, and the inspiring new facilities. As the number of teams grew, so did school spirit and competitive success in the league championships and, increasingly, in end-of-season playoffs. The middle school and lower school programs were also more fully consolidated.

The seachange came with the Men's Varsity Basketball team led by legendary Bay Area coach, Carl Jacobs. In 2005 they became BCL West champions and were finalAlex ists in the Division V North Coast Section playoffs. They repeated this spectacular outcome in 2006.

Next came Women’s Varsity Basketball. In 2008-09, the Jaguar team were undefeated in league play and beat Urban in the BCL West Championship after winning 12 games straight. They earned the #2 seed in the North Coast Sectionals and, painfully, lost in the Championship final for the second year in a row. These successes sealed the school’s reputation as an inclusive and highly-competitive athletics school. In more recent years, soccer and volleyball have risen to the fore and had their share of championship successes.

Excellence in interscholastic athletics is part of a larger commitment to excellence in education and educating the whole human being. Students take pride in representing something bigger than themselves. They build strong relationships with their teammates and develop healthy practices of mind, body, and character–with true sportsmanship and equity front and center.

During the year leading up to the sexagennial celebrations, 212 Jaguar athletes competed on 20 different teams on the playing fields, courts, track, and in the pool. Fan Jams and end-of-season banquets are always charismatic and celebratory, oozing with upbeat school spirit. The program continues to grow. Sailing and skiing are now well-established club sports, and men's volleyball and women's lacrosse were introduced in the fall of 2021.

Margaret Nwabueze, Class of 2013, was one of many college-bound athletes who have written about the International athletics experience over the years. According to Margaret,“Track and field is typically an individual sport, but our team functions as one unit. We support one another fully during competitions, and when one runner does well, we’ve all succeeded. I think the success of our team has everything to do with the guidance of our amazing coach.”