The Curwin girls, ages ten, eight and six, move between French and English the way their figure skates glide over ice. Their parents have to stand outside the rink. Roxanne Mendoza, their mother, understands about half of what they say when they talk among themselves or with their French-speaking nanny, one of several the Curwins have employed over the years. Their father, Gary Curwin, is left out entirely. He understands not a word, "pas un mot," as the girls like to say.

Children from families like the Curwins make up one third of the student body, grades pre-kindergarten to twelfth, of the Lycée Français, falling into the enrollment category of "U.S. Citizens." Another third of the students have French citizenship and the last third have dual French-American citizenship. In Manhattan, the two other private, French-English schools with consistent bilingual instruction beyond the preschool level have comparable demographics. Parent interest in all three schools is high.

This passion for studying French is not limited to those who can afford an annual tuition of around twenty-five thousand dollars. At public schools in four of New York's five boroughs, advocacy groups have helped institute dual language programs in French in elementary schools, where Spanish programs are much more prevalent. And in addition to the Lycée Français, the Lyceum Kennedy and L'Ecole Internationale de New York, there are five other private elementary and preschools in New York City that cater to French families and those who seek French culture. Three of these have opened just in the past five years. Why and why now? For the three hundred thousand New Yorkers with a French connection, it is, as it has always been, primarily an effort to preserve their cultural and linguistic bonds. Those sans French background see bilingual education as aspirational, a way to gain what they see as important cultural capital for their families.

Yet this renaissance of enthusiasm for bilingual French-English education stops at exit 31 on Interstate 495. Outside of Manhattan and its sister boroughs, budget cuts within the past couple of years have led four Long Island public school districts to remove French instruction at the middle school level; at least two more plan to phase out the language next year. The trend reaches beyond the borders of the state of New York, affecting public schools in districts managing budget cuts throughout the United States.

What makes New York stand out in the renewed interest in Francophilia appears to be a combination of the relatively large number of French or Francophone nationals who live in the city permanently or temporarily, and the affinity of many New Yorkers for French language and society. As immigrants from France move to this cultural mecca, American residents latch onto the history and culture they bring with them. The French value what many New Yorkers do--the arts, fine food and intellectual pursuits--and the language's pleasing sound lends it an air of sophistication that some feel English lacks. To a certain New York set, French equals chic.

* * *

On a Wednesday morning in February, Leo, who is three years old, took a black beret from a box of dress-up clothes, plopped it on his head and posed proudly. Sophie joined him, grabbing other mismatched articles of clothing from the plastic bin against the wall, deciding who would be who in the area of the large room marked off with blue tape for imaginative play. Leo turned away from the bin to lift a doll from its cradle. "Petit bébé," he said as he handed the doll to Sophie, giggling, perhaps at his brief inclusion of French in their game. They exchanged other three-year-old thoughts in English and were interrupted only briefly when one of the French teachers walked through the play area from the back room.

"Je suis le papa de Sophie!" Leo declared.

"Mais, non!" the teacher replied in mock horror.

Leo attends Le Petit Paradis, a Montessori preschool on the Upper East Side of Manhattan that offers instruction in French and English. Its name is French for "little paradise" and the school is small. Made up of just two rooms, the preschool has had full enrollment since opening day three years ago, when a large group of Manhattan parents, including Madonna, chose it for their toddlers' bilingual instruction. Here, two classes of fifteen students each speak French and English throughout the day with one French- and one English-speaking teacher.

As the children play in the safari-themed room, they switch between languages as comfortably as they would their favorite toys, effortlessly responding in French to the French teachers and in English to the American ones. As for the students, there are a few giveaways as to what their first language might be. I hear one native Francophone child, Elsa, command her growing tower of wooden blocks, "Ça va pas tomber! Ça va pas tomber! Ça va pas tomber!"

Leo is what Christina Houri, the school's founder, would call an international student. His parents speak five languages between them. His Chinese mother, Elaine Hsu-Sanchez is conversant in English, Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese and a little Spanish. Her Latin American husband is fluent in English and Spanish. They have imparted three of these languages to their two children, Leo and his older sister, Lina. The children, though, speak a total of four languages in varying degrees of fluency: English, Spanish, Mandarin and French.

Still in his first year at Le Petit Paradis, Leo picked up French after only a few months. When he started at the bilingual preschool, he understood Mandarin and some English. He had Chinese nannies, not French ones. Now he has no trouble telling Sophie he will play the dad and his French teacher that he is indeed Sophie's papa.

Houri, who speaks six languages herself, estimates that about eighty percent of the students at Le Petit Paradis come from French families, ten percent from international families and ten percent from American families. She would like to see this last group grow. "There is such a limited percentage [of Americans] that really are keen on languages," she said. "It's not because America has all the states that are speaking one language that we should not have children learn more languages, so hopefully that mentality will change."

Although the percentage of American families at Houri's school is small, this number would have been smaller almost thirty years ago when Le Jardin à L'Ouest first opened for Manhattan's French-speaking families. In 1972, Dominique Bordereaux-Hiigli and her husband, John Hiigli, began a nursery program for two- to five-year-olds in their duplex apartment on the Upper West Side. The school opened officially in 1975, and since then has provided childcare and education to some thirty students at a time, exclusively in French. "We were the only school for many, many years and of course this decade everything seems to have changed," Bordereaux-Hiigli said.

Le Jardin à L'Ouest was, in the beginning, more of a daycare center than a structured preschool. Today, its five-person staff prepares children for kindergarten with half-day programs that focus on art as well as the French language. And the school has just begun to acquire company, at least in the French aspect of its program. In recent years, Bordereaux-Hiigli has offered advice to educators wishing to start a preschool like hers. Houri, once a student teacher at Le Jardin à L'Ouest, was one such educator.

Yves Rivaud, founder of L'Ecole Internationale de New York, also became involved with bilingual French education at another New York school. He used to be the head of Lyceum Kennedy, a French American school in midtown. In its third year, L'Ecole Internationale de New York is a more recent addition to the schools that start French education in pre-school. When Rivaud decided to open L'Ecole Internationale de New York in the Gramercy area of Manhattan in September 2009, he felt certain he would fill the spots for students from the nursery school level to fifth grade. "We decided to [create] this school because so far you have only two French schools in Manhattan and knowing that you have eight million people in Manhattan, we definitely need a third school," he said, adding that the spots for the youngest students are highest in demand.

Parents understand that the earlier children take on a new language, the easier it will be for them to become and remain bilingual. Houri, a strong believer in the benefits of early bilingualism, gives prospective parents a list of ten reasons to choose bilingual education over more traditional options, including possible benefits to brain development and later academic progress. She believes that children tend to be more creative, have stronger analytical skills and are much more likely to speak their second languages as well as native speakers. Houri points out in her list that this combination makes it easier for bilingual children who attend French preschools to gain acceptance to prestigious elementary schools, like the Lycée Français. "Otherwise," she said, "the way the American system is going it's too late. It's just, unfortunately, a lot of kids will learn [languages] when the brain is just not absorbing as much as earlier on."

A 2001 study titled "Bilingualism in Development: Language, Literacy and Cognition" by Ellen Bialystok, a professor of psychology at York University, reports that early bilingualism benefits cognitive development but does not necessarily make children smarter. While children who become bilingual during preschool are able to better "selectively attend to relevant information," they may have smaller vocabularies in one or the other language than monolingual preschoolers. Hsu-Sanchez, though, says that her children are able to speak multiple languages without issue.

Though Leo and Lina might not yet be able to make use of all four of the languages they are able to speak and comprehend, their parents see their multilingualism as beneficial to their cultural and cognitive development. "It's like taking piano lessons," Hsu-Sanchez said. "You don't necessarily want to make sure your children become pianists but it's working a different part of the brain." It would be easier, though, for Hsu-Sanchez's children to stick to the languages their parents already speak fluently, begging the question, "Pourquoi le Français?"

Actually, there is a logical reason for Lina to have started speaking French. She began learning the language at the preschool she attended when the family was living in Paris. When they moved to New York, her parents thought it best to continue with her French instruction. At age four, but just for a year, she attended Le Petit Paradis the first year it opened. Lina, now six, does not attend the Lycée Français, and this is a bit unusual for having attended a preschool Houri describes as a "feeder" for the bilingual elementary and high school. Instead she attends P.S. 6, a highly regarded public school that only offers foreign language instruction in Spanish and Mandarin during classes after school. This doesn't mean that Lina has stopped speaking French. With a French tutor, she spends two-and-a-half hours twice a week in French conversation and play.

Her brother will likely follow the same course. "I think it would be a major decision if we were going to put them on the French path," Hsu-Sanchez said. "So we decided a few years of French when they are young and then we'll continue to hire tutors and babysitters to speak French." To Hsu-Sanchez, French is no less important than any of the other languages her children speak. "French, we like it because it's very beautiful and very difficult to learn and so we see them using it for really a kind of personal cultivation and to open their minds to different cultures," she said.

The Curwins' mother, Roxanne Mendoza, was also attracted to French for its beauty. And like Hsu-Sanchez, she is familiar with the need for a French nanny in a non-French-speaking household. When her first daughter, Bridget, was eight months old, her mother enrolled her in a French class at the Language Workshop for Children. During one of these classes, Mendoza heard another child with an American mother speaking beautiful unaccented French. She was moved to ask how this was possible. The girl's mother told her that she had a French-speaking nanny.

To Mendoza, the idea seemed like a good one. When Mia, her second child, was born, the family's nanny had just left and Mendoza began the search for one who spoke French. Bridget was two-and-a-half years old and Mia was about six months old when the first French nanny came to work for them. Speaking French was also a requirement for the occasional evening babysitter. By the time Ashley came along a year later, the set up for the youngest daughter's eventual bilingualism was in place. For eight to ten hours a day, someone was speaking in French to the Curwin girls.

Any questions as to whether the hours of French exposure were working towards the girls' fluency were answered for Mendoza when she noticed Ashley talking in her sleep. Her words were neither English nor the nonsensical sounds of sleep-speech. The Curwins' youngest daughter was dreaming in French.

These are the first two sections of an article I wrote for New York University's Shoe Leather Magazine. The full piece can be read at shoeleathermagazine.com. 

 Photo Credit: Jonas Cuénin