School Year Abroad
Students intensively learn the respective language of their country and live with a carefully selected host family.
Students earn U.S. high school credits while attending SYA, and preparing for selective U.S. colleges and universities.
SYA guides students through a challenging curriculum focused on developing skills for an increasingly interdependent world.
The original incarnation was "Schoolboys Abroad" and consisted of 11 students accompanied by founder Clark Vaughan and his wife Polly, plus two more teachers, who in 1964, traveled by ship on the MS Aurelia to study in Barcelona, Spain.
The move took place in order to facilitate the ease with which students learned and heard Castilian Spanish spoke around them.
As the program grew in Barcelona, it became clear that the proliferation of Catalan, as well as the number of tourists, detracted from the immersion of the students.
SYA Spain students attend classes on the sprawling, 425-square-meter second floor of a Neoclassical building in Zaragoza's city center on Paseo de Pamplona.
.” Burgos, Madrid, Toledo or Sevilla enables an SYA student to go to one of these cities to attend classes and live with a local host family for five full days.
The popular 'International Gemellaggio' club connects SYA Italy students with local Italian peers for language and cultural exchanges.
Based on language proficiency tests administered in September and language-study previous records, students are placed in one of four groups (Arthur, Morgane, Lancelot, or Viviane which are named after characters from the fabled Knights of the Round Table which is thought to have taken place in Brittany).
Chinese Culture and Society met two periods each week, in addition to guest lectures and field trips.
Martial arts, traditional Chinese brush painting, calligraphy and music were offered as noncredit courses, pass/fail.
Students were placed in class according to their proficiency in Chinese, which was assessed by a diagnostic exam administered at the beginning of the school year.
