A week ago, I arrived with my wife, Chris, and my daughter, Emma, in Leysin, a little town in Switzerland. Chris is working as a nurse at a private boarding school, and Emma, who is 5 years old, will be going to the Swiss public school.

The boarding school, called the Leysin American School, was founded in 1961. Its dorms and other buildings are former sanatoriums, dating back over a century, when a common treatment for tuberculosis was mountain air and lots of sun. By 1955 there were no more patients, however, due to the invention of medicines that went beyond fresh air and sunshine. In place of patients are tourists who hike and ski and students in schools like the Leysin American School.

While Chris spent her first week in staff orientation, Emma and I explored Leysin. We visited her school, but found no one there but a workman fixing some fallen plaster and a half dozen teenage boys playing basketball in the gym.

The school has four buildings. The preschool, which is a combination of what we know as the last year of preschool and kindergarten, is held in the small peach-colored building. Higher grades are in a four-story building of dark brown wood.

The gym is a building itself, and presumably teacher offices and more classrooms are in the fourth building. While the four-story building looks much like the other Swiss chalets that hug the mountainside here, the small peach building is more utilitarian, with a playground composed of one small slide and a reasonably flat stretch of asphalt.

In contrast to Minnesota, where we regularly compared notes with our friends regarding how much our pre-school kids were already reading, I'm told that reading won't be emphasized. Emma's school year will focus on social development. I'm glad to hear this, since learning to read in French when Emma doesn't speak French seems unnecessarily difficult.

Social development will include lots of play, swimming lessons every other week, and, as befits a village in the Swiss Alps, ski lessons. At 5 years old, Emma is actually two years behind in ski lessons!

School is from 8:35 to 11:50 a.m. four days a week, with additional afternoon sessions from 2:05 to 3:40 p.m. three days a week. There is talk that there are enough non-native French speakers to form a special morning class of mixed-age groups to learn French. This sounds like the equivalent of a pull-out English as a Second Language class in Minnesota, only the goal here is acquisition of French, of course.

A bus will pick up Emma and the other children of Leysin American School employees for the trip down to the village. The first day, however, we've been asked to be there in person, outside the school. Each teacher will read the names of the children in her class. Students are then invited into the building.

I don't yet know how I'll feel as a parent, standing outside that little peach-colored building, as Emma troops inside with her soon-to-be new friends. Lonely, probably, and proud. And a little intimidated that she is going to learn Swiss culture and French language a whole lot faster than I am.

Paul Magnuson lived in Robbinsdale and served on the District 281 School Board until last month, when he and his family moved to Switzerland.