Haut-Lac International Bilingual School is planning to gather its whole school onto a single campus at Praz-Dagoud in Saint-Légier, above Vevey. Plans for the extension are currently out for public review.
This isn’t about growing the school. Haut-Lac’s older secondary pupils are currently taught on it’s Roches Grises site, and the lease there runs out in 2036 with no option to renew. The Praz-Dagoud site is only a few hundred metres away, so instead of starting over somewhere new, the school decided to build on land it already uses and keep the two parts of school life under one roof.
Vevey architects Brönnimann & Gottreux have drawn up the design: an L-shaped building of four storeys, set beside the public playground, with the park and the trees above it kept as they are. The school is funding the project itself, at an estimated 25 to 30 million francs. The new building will house around twenty classrooms, plus science labs, a music room, a cafeteria, a 300-seat auditorium and more space for staff offices and the library.
What began as a constraint has turned into a chance to do things better. Running one campus instead of two makes the timetable far easier to manage. At the moment, anyone moving between the sites loses valuable lesson time to the journey. Bringing everyone onto one site will make the school day run more smoothly for students, staff and family alike. Numbers will also stay where they are, at roughly 600 day and boarding students aged 3 to 18.
If the review goes through, building could start in 2028 and the move would follow in 2030. The couples who founded Haut-Lac with just thirteen children back in 1993, see this as a fresh start on a campus built around how the school actually works. Read more in the local newspaper article.
