Lyceum Kennedy French American School, New York | Fees, Rankings, Address, Admission, Vacancies, Reviews & More

Our daughter has been at Lyceum Kennedy for one year and recently started her second year. Her French improved remarkably after her first semester due to the classroom schedule that alternates between an American teacher and NY State curriculum and a French teacher teaching a French curriculum. The classroom experience is enhanced with local field trips and several after-school offerings, including Kinderdance, piano and violin lessons, arts and crafts and Spanish classes (for an additional fee of course). While the school does have several dedicated teachers, most of the administration and all of the board of directors are lacking in their focus on improving the school’s academics or retaining teachers and students long term. The school apparently does not help the foreign French teachers obtain work visas, which creates a continually revolving door of new teachers every 3 years or so. This leads to a lack of stability and continuity in the school, compounded by a continually changing student body largely made up of the children of expats and UN employees who stay in NY for only 2 or 3 years usually.
That said, the student body is more ethnically mixed that at other NYC French schools, and the children are exposed to a broad array of countries and cultures as part of their curriculum – not only French and American. The Parents Association is quite active and working toward ensuring the elementary children have outdoor recess every day (an issue over which they recently butted heads with the administrators) as well as pursuing new fundraising efforts. Hopefully the administration is receptive to these efforts and a new Head of School is hired soon.

My daughter has been attending the middle school in Manhattan campus since our arrival in NY last year in December (she came from another French school abroad). Everyone (teachers and children) helped my daughter to set in the middle of the school year. I found greats teachers highly trained. The french program of National Education is fully respected and it is enriched with some american subjects (american history and maths) so that after few month my daughter started to speak also english. I’m sure that after our 4 years in NYC she will be trilingual (french, english and italian). They also study another language (choice between Spanish and German) and they also organize really interesting activities after school (my daughter attends theatre club). We are really happy with the Lyceum Kennedy!

My son attended Lyceum Kennedy for 2 years. Unfortunately we had to relocate from NY for work reasons. My son is now attending a Lycee on the West Coast. I cannot say strongly enough that the level of education he received at Lyceum Kennedy was outstanding. Not only academically…the level of care and respect shown to the students by the teachers was also truly amazing. The small size of the school allows this to happen. He still talks about the school and will always remember it.