I'm originally from France and I've lived in the U.S. since 2012. For several years I tried to find a list of French schools here and never could. So I decided to build it myself, one school at a time, across the whole country.
I've lived on both the East and West Coasts. Today I'm in the New York metro area, and my kids go to a French school here. One I didn't even know existed until two years after I moved to my neighborhood.
My wife and I both work remotely, so we spend a lot of time on a question that turns out to be surprisingly hard to answer: where else could we live? A French school nearby is one of our criteria, for two reasons. First, I want my kids to have a strong education in French. Second, a city with a French school is almost always a city with an international, diverse crowd, and that matters to us almost as much as the school itself.
I started looking, and kept hitting the same wall. There was no list. The big lycées in New York and San Francisco are easy to find; everything else isn't. Public dual-language programs across Louisiana and Utah, a charter school in Minneapolis, a district program in Maine: they exist, and most families have never heard of them.
Finding a school was only half of it. Tuition sits deep in the admissions section when it is published at all, in a different shape at every school: a range across grade bands here, a per-grade table there, a “contact us” somewhere else. There was nowhere to see them side by side.
I built it myself instead. It was important to me to cover the entire country, not only the large metro areas, so this directory includes every state where I could find these schools.
French has to carry a substantial part of the teaching, not a few periods a week. That covers dual language programs that split the day, stronger immersion models such as 90/10, and schools following the full French national curriculum. How the split is structured varies by school and by grade, and many districts never publish an exact figure.
Academic subjects are taught in French: math, science, history. The school directory does not include schools where French is taught as a foreign-language class, nor after-school programs, weekend schools, summer camps, tutoring or language centers.
Public and charter programs make up most of the school directory, and they take the most work to document. The details are spread across district pages, state education records and local news, and the share of the day taught in French is often not published anywhere. When a public program meets the criteria but little is documented, I list it with what I could confirm.
Standalone preschools and daycares have their own daycare directory at /daycares, which uses its own bar of at least half the day in French. A maternelle or pre-K section inside a K-12 school stays in the school directory, since the school itself is listed.
Starting points were Villa Albertine and LabelFrancÉducation. Both helped, and both turned out to be incomplete, especially on the public side. A few of the schools they listed had already stopped teaching French. I started curating the list by hand, working from school and district websites and AEFE homologation records.
Programs change: they get cut, relocated, or phased out as cohorts age out. A listing that is out of date sends families toward a program that no longer runs, so when I find one I take it off the list and keep it off. Entries are updated through the year, and tuition figures are refreshed for each new school year to keep them as accurate as possible.
Suggest a school, flag a correction, or just say hello. If you spot something wrong or missing, please tell me. Your note reaches me directly.