Leysin American School LAS Summer (Ages 10-17)

“In response to an increasing demand from my clients for summer camps in Switzerland, I paid a visit to the Leysin American School. I had already heard of it from parents who had sent their children there in the past (and said that the children wanted to return to it), and while I was there, also had the opportunity to say hello to two of my clients who reported being very happy with their program, so much that one wanted to continue the school year there. That desire came as no surprise to me; on that visit, one of the owners, Christoph Ott, showed me the school’s main facilities, and illustrated for me the details of its summer programs. LAS offers it participants the possibility of studying English or French as a language, but also much more in terms of enrichment courses, sports, and extracurricular activities. It also runs the 3-week LAS Edge leadership program.
The town of Leysin is in the mountains, and prior to the discovery of penicillin, was the home of several clinics in which patients sought treatment for tuberculosis, due to the quality of the surrounding air. Leysin is in fact still known as the Oxygene des Alpes, the “Oxygen of the Alps.” It is not a terribly large place, but it has several sizable buildings that originated for that purpose and have now been converted into hotels or other establishments. The biggest and most impressive of these, at the top of the town and overlooking it, is the Leysin American School, formerly the Grand Hotel with its own train station that is still in use. The main buildings there form part of its Belle Epoque campus, whose beauty reflect the architecture of that era and is still very much in evidence on the interior and exterior. A bit further down a winding road is its Savoy campus, which is more modern and also contains its sports complex. Every one of the buildings I saw was fantastic and representative of the very best that money can buy in a school. Students who attend one of LAS’ two summer camps will not only have a high quality academic program with a wide variety of course and workshop choices, and small classes for individual attention, but will also enjoy a taste of life at one of the world’s most exclusive boarding schools at a relatively more accessible price what it would cost during the school year. Programs in Switzerland also offer other advantages in general: for the country’s historic neutrality, at the world level it is extremely safe, and within it, the country is famous for being extraordinarily orderly, functional, and beautiful. For Italians, it is one of the few countries accessible from the north of the country by car, in case parents want to avoid having their children travel by plane to get to some of the camps, and even if they do, in the case of the Leysin American School, flights to and from Geneva are frequent and less expensive than between major cities in Italy, the UK and Ireland during the summer. Additionally, in July, when the request for summer camps in highest, Switzerland is the only country on the European continent with programs run completely in English that are not full of other Italians. Most of them also offer multiple language options, so that children can study more than one language without changing destinations.”