French American School of Puget Sound

French American School of Puget Sound

Independent bilingual school on Mercer Island · preschool (from 18 months) through grade 8 · 323 K-8 students plus 148 preschoolers (Washington State Board of Education, 2024-25) · accredited by both the Northwest Association of Independent Schools (NWAIS) and the French Ministry of Education

The verdict

The French American School of Puget Sound (FASPS) is not a prep school with French electives; it is two national curricula run in parallel. Instruction splits 50/50 between English and French from the earliest grades. The French half follows the French Ministry of National Education's cycle framework, since the school holds the Ministry's accreditation and affiliates with the AEFE (Agence pour l'enseignement français à l'étranger, the French government's network of schools abroad). The American half carries MAP (Measures of Academic Progress) benchmarking, phonics-based literacy, and Common Core-aligned math. Two facts should anchor any evaluation. First, you don't need French: entry through kindergarten requires no prior exposure, the FAST track (the school's intensive French catch-up lane) conditionally admits non-francophone kids from grade 1, and 62% of current families have no French-speaking parent at home. Second, the payoff question has a documented answer. Graduates split three ways, to local privates, to strong public high schools like Ballard and Bellevue, and to international destinations from a Montreal collège to boarding schools, carrying a credential that travels in a way monolingual K-8 transcripts don't. Budget for the top of the PK-8 market ($43,850 middle school for 2026-27, plus a $3,950 new-family fee), and ignore third-party rating sites entirely here, because both their demographic data and the widely quoted "acceptance rate" for this school are corrupted, as unpacked below. Look elsewhere if you want the option to opt out: the dual curriculum is the whole school, with no monolingual lane.