The 800 students of the FASNY (French American School of New York) were not the only ones to make their return in September. It was also Francis Gianni's. The Parisian has become this year the sixth principal of the bilingual Westchester, replacing Joel Peinado party in Lebanon after seven years in this position. "I am very enthusiastic. There are some nice things to do, he says. In the immediate future, I want to be one with the school and take the time to listen".
Unlike other heads of international schools, Francis Gianni is not a pure product of French institutions abroad. "fascinated"By philosophy,"spine of my life"He goes to study at the Sorbonne in the 90s"without asking me what I was going to do with it. I wanted to do the most and the best I could". He finished second in the aggregation.
Feeling cramped in the middle of "Parisian nerds"He feels the need to take off and"to open the doors and windows of the United States". He became a philosophy teacher in Texas and Arizona, before being recruited by electronics giant ST Electronics. At the time, the Arizona-based Franco-Italian company was looking for academics to design training for its engineers and managers. For more than two years, he has been developing, as a project manager, programs in the field of inter-cultural and team building. "I did not know anything about it. But I found the project cheeky and exciting ".
In 2002, with this experience at the crossroads of business and education, he returned to France to head the school La Source in the Paris region, his first position at the head of a school. Two years later, he joined the bilingual network: he spent ten years at the helm of the Jeannine Manuel bilingual school in Lille, an international reference institution founded in 1954 and associated with UNESCO. This is his first contact with international education.
"I did not receive bilingual education while growing up. It was very far from my cultural horizon. At school in Paris, there was little English at school. To acquire a good level of language, you had to do something else, explains this grandson of Italian and Spanish immigrants. I spoke Italian but no longer saw my Italian family. And my parents and grandparents did everything to integrate us. They forced themselves not to speak Italian at home".
In 2019, after five years as headmaster of the International School of Monaco, which he increased the number of students and pilot the project of new campus, he returned to the United States with his American wife and children. He found in FASNY an institution of excellence approved by the National Education, which is among the best in the North American network.
He inherits however the hot file of the construction of the new campus of the school in White Plains. The school has to see its copy again after a trial of court with an association of residents worried about the impact of this campus on the traffic and tranquility of the neighborhood. At the beginning of September, the Gedney Association, far from quarreling, sent a letter to the White Plains City Council complaining about how "Unacceptable and shameful"Whose FASNY maintains the property she has acquired, a former golf club.
Francis Gianni speaks of a "rather long episode of annoyance"And only indicates that"it's a file that will move forward very quickly". It will be necessary to be a philosopher.
