Featured School of the Week: International Leadership Academy

From our friends at the International Leadership Academy:

Give your child the gift of early foreign language study. Provide unique insight into other cultures and build their cultural competency skills in a way that no other discipline is able to do.

The International Leadership Academy (ILA) offers a stimulating learning environment in Lake Oswego’s longest established immersion school and the only US and French accredited school in the area.

Our mission is to provide a technological, artistic, and critical-thinking orientated setting for our students. We maximize individual potential and ensure that students of all ability levels are well-equipped to meet the challenges of education, work, and life. We seek to assist our students in discovering who they are so they can proudly express and nurture their own ideas.

“The age of ten is a crucial time in the development of attitudes toward nations and groups perceived as ‘other,’” according to the research of Piaget, Lambert and others. “At age 10, children are in the process of moving from egocentricity to reciprocity and information received before age 10 is eagerly received.”

This is why ILA opened its first language daycare in 2016, serving children from 10 weeks to 2 years old; in addition to offering preschool through 6th grade education since 2010.

Parent Perspective

A parent’s perspective on why they choose ILA over local public schools:

• ILA provides a full-day French immersion education with native French speakers, and Spanish instruction from a native speaker.

• All teachers at ILA have a post-university one-year teaching certificate, including preschool and toddler.

• ILA provides small, intimate class sizes.

• The school provides a nurturing community.

• ILA’s kindergarten classes remain geared to the learning modes of 5 year old’s and to each child’s developmental level, with time for sensory exploration, self-expression, and arts. Kindergarten is still kindergarten.

• Common core requirements are acknowledged but not strictly observed in the ILA curriculum. At the same time, history, geography, social studies, cursive writing, art, and music remain integral parts of the curriculum.

• ILA provides a unique academic structure of 7 weeks intensive learning followed by 1-week “Immersion Through Culture” session with circus, sports, cooking and art.

• Music and P.E. instruction are taught twice per week by teachers certified in their field.

• Students go on monthly field trips to OMSI, Oregon Zoo, Portland Art Museum, the pumpkin patch, and more. Grades 1-5 attend a 4-day outdoor school at French Camp on Canoe Island and attend a ski field trip on Mount Hood.

• The hot lunch program, offered 5 days a week, is just $5 a meal. Healthy balanced meals are cooked fresh daily with many organic ingredients and fresh produce.

• Many students with a high-quality, bilingual education like ILA’s receive scholarships for their university studies.

Why ILA

At ILA, we know every child can be a leader and we value integrity, respect, and innovation as the keys to effective leadership; these core values are reflected in all areas of the school. We help each student develop to their full potential through supporting creativity, adaptability, tolerance, self-confidence, resiliency, humanism, pragmatism, and responsibility at the core of every curriculum initiative.

We envision of a world where people learn to respect, accept, and embrace the differences between us. This is the core of what makes our world so beautiful.

Let us bring ILA to you.

Open House

Our open houses are the perfect way to get to know our French immersion daycare, preschool, and elementary school.

• Register for our January 26th in-person open house (preschool-6th grade) – 9am-12pm

• Schedule a 1:1 Zoom meeting

• Call at 503 662 8452

• Visit the school website at www.ilapdx.org