Dropping off her laundry bag in the lobby, 16-year-old Yoyo Hu waves to the staff of her ritzy apartment complex before heading off to class.
“See you later!” she calls out to her concierge, who gives her a fatherly thumbs-up. While the staff looks out for all the children who live in the Wall Street building, they make an extra effort for kids like Yoyo, a fresh-faced sophomore from Shanghai who’s 7,000 miles from home.
She’s just one of some 80 students at the Léman Manhattan International Boarding School. Manhattan’s first and only residential school offers well-heeled 15- to 18-year-olds perks their public- and even private-school peers can only dream of: a 25-yard indoor pool and fully equipped gym, trips to Broadway shows like “Wicked,” the US Tennis Open and Disney World; a rock-climbing wall and professionally designed theater; and, from its perch on the top four floors of the Cunard Building in lower Manhattan, classrooms overlooking the Statue of Liberty and New York Harbor.
Naturally, this kind of education doesn’t come cheap: High-school tuition, room and board for Léman’s 2014-15 academic year totals $72,000 — $25,000 more than preppy Exeter Academy and $12,000 more than Harvard. And that doesn’t even include such expenses as field trips, uniforms, laptops and health insurance, which add another $6,000.
Then again, there aren’t any other boarding schools out there whose dorm rooms are in a luxury building in the Financial District, complete with twice-weekly housekeeping, a once-a-week wash-and-fold laundry service and a concierge.
“Being in school in Manhattan is very exciting,” says Yoyo, a Chinese ad exec’s daughter who began her second year at Léman last month. “It’s a great way to experience the city and everything it has got to offer in terms of culture and the arts.”
Like other wealthy overseas parents who send their children to the school, Yoyo’s mother and father were attracted by the facilities, location and academic reputation — Léman grads have gone on to the University of Pennsylvania, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Middlebury, Oberlin, Skidmore and other top-tier institutions.
“My mom and dad thought it was a great opportunity for me,” Yoyo says.
She adds that her parents, like many Chinese, consider their own education system “too harsh” because it relies on a single test — the Gaokao, taken at age 18 — to determine a child’s college future, if any.
Besides, Yoyo adds, “Who wouldn’t want to live in New York City?”
Unlike competitors Hackley School in Tarrytown, Westchester County, or Ross School in East Hampton, LI, Léman doesn’t market itself as a domestic boarding school. (It also has 100 day pupils, whose annual fees are a mere $42,000.) This year, only three of its boarders are American. One of them is Nicolas Sterling, 15.
“It made sense for me to stay overnight in the city. Otherwise, it would be a two-hour commute in both directions,” says Nicolas, who sees his parents, a TV producer and a p.r. executive, on weekends, when he goes home to Cold Spring in Putnam County.
Five days a week, he shares an apartment in the “Léman residences” on Wall Street with two Chinese boys and a Swede.
Drew Alexander, head of the Léman School, says the 81 boarders hail from 17 countries — principally Iran, Mexico, Ukraine, Gambia and China — and speak a total of 28 languages.
Families are mostly courted and recruited at elite boarding-school fairs held in hotels in capital cities across the world, such as Moscow, Istanbul and Kiev.
Security is tight. Lights out is at 10:30 p.m., after the house parents have made their rounds of the students’ apartments, setting alarms in each one. An electronic monitoring system sends them a text if anyone leaves or enters the dorms.
But there’s still plenty of time for fun. When William Tellman isn’t readying for his constitutional-law or astronomy classes, the 18-year-old Stockholm native works out at the New York Health and Racquet Club, where all Léman boarders are members.
“Weekends are awesome,” says Tellman, who’s been at Léman for two years. “We just went to see the New York Giants versus Houston, Texas, at the MetLife Stadium. It was so cool. How many people get to go to school and do that?”