News & Weekly Letters

I am writing to you today from Nashville, where this year’s NAIS (National Association of Independent Schools) conference for heads of school is taking place. It’s an important annual event that I have wanted to attend ever since starting at The École, but there are always so many other things to do that it was complicated to imagine not being at school, so I kept postponing it—until this year, when I finally took the plunge.

As I already mentioned here, February 14, five years ago, was the day I wrapped up my interviews for the position of head of school at The École. It remains an important date for me, an opportunity to reflect on the journey I have taken. To mark the occasion, Andria and I will have dinner tonight in the same restaurant we bustled into in 2020, and we’ll toast the upcoming February break.

It’s time for me to take a small step back to semester one and thank the parents and staff who took the time to complete the first round of satisfaction surveys of this school year. We’ve analyzed the results–a huge thank you to Christophe, whose insights are always so enlightening–in order to better understand what you like and what you don’t like so much about The École. This feedback, along with the input I get from parents during my monthly breakfasts, helps us continue to improve our school and make it an even better fit for you.

As you may know, I started this week in Florida, in St. Pete, to be exact—a name that conjures up images of sun, sea, and sand. And it’s true the weather is definitely milder there. For example, the sun is so strong that everyone eats lunch in the shade, which makes you feel like you haven’t flown two and a half hours by plane but rather time traveled 6 months and landed smack bang in the middle of July. But since I was in St. Pete for work, I spent the vast majority of my time in an impersonal conference room (in a few years, I won’t remember the time or the place when I look for my face in the group photo misleadingly taken around the swimming pool).

When you are a French person living abroad–and this is true of all nationalities–you realize pretty quickly that the locals often have a stereotypical image of you. Through cinema, literature, sport, politics, or the economy, everyone already has a clear vision of what it means to be French. For example, French people smoke cigarettes in the street, wrapped in designer scarves, shielding them from the cold. French people complain, philosophize, rationalize, and read books written in tiny font. French men open doors for women while clenching a rose between their teeth (true story: when interviewing a Taiwanese family applying for the Lycée français de Taipei, I asked them why they had chosen a French school. Their answer: so our daughters can marry French men.)