Our students come from diverse cultural backgrounds. One third of our students come from American families, one third from French families and one third from international and bilingual families. Twenty nationalities* are represented at the school and 8% of our students speak another language at home. We are proud of this diversity which enriches our program. In fact, we created a committee of parents, our Diversity Committee, whose responsibility is to find ways of continuing to attract a culturally, ethnically and socio-economically diverse school population. Our students have different language abilities in English and in French, ranging from being fluent in both languages to being monolingual in either language. Most of our non-French speaking students enter in pre-kindergarten or kindergarten and a few of them are admitted in first grade.

This admission policy ensures that all of our students maintain a good ability level in French in the elementary grades. Our non-English speaking students, helped by their English speaking environment, receive support instruction in English and are able to fully participate in their regular English class at the end of their first year at EFIP.

In order to capitalize on our cultural differences and to foster a sense of community in our school, we also created a Parents Welcoming Committee which ensures that each new familiy is welcomed to our school community and introduced to a family who is already familiar with our school. The Welcoming Committee tries to pair families of different cultural origins who live in the same geographical area when setting up this buddy system.

The countries of origin of our students have included Canada, Mexico, Portugal, Lebanon, South Korea, Japan, Columbia, Algeria, Germany, Switzerland, Haiti, Poland, Bosnia, Israel, Tunisia, Italy, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, El Salvador, Cuba, Ivory Coast, Sweden, Belgium, Russia and Iran.