Leghorn American School (part of USFA) History
Opened: 1952
Closed: 1956
Leghorn American School was located just outside the village of Salviano, near Livorno (Leghorn), Italy. It was surrounded by fields of wheat, groves of olive and fruit trees, and vineyards.
From the classroom windows students were able to see the blue Mediterranean on one side and rolling hills covered with cypress trees on the other. The school was in the Villa La Leccia. The Villa La Leccia was over 200 years old and was once a convent. The hand-carved front door was a work of art. It was brought there from the island of Cyprus many years ago.
The staff of the 1949-50 yearbook provided a detailed description of the school.
Tucked in between the harbors, factories, Medici castles, piazzas, palm trees, and bicycles in the port city of Livorno stands our W. A. C. barrack-office building-school. You might say that this is a strange place to hold school, but even stranger still is our high school. It is a correspondence school, with executive headquarters six hundred miles distant in Austria and teachers five thousand miles distant in Nebraska, U. S. A. We work entirely by correspondence; the printed work sheet, the essays, the mail deliveries, and the mailed envelopes rounding out our day.
Although our total enrollment for the year has numbered only seventeen students, and at present we have just twelve, we have enjoyed many of the privileges that are found in a normal high school. We have contributed articles to two newspapers, organized a small football team, conducted a P. T. A. program, have held a monthly study trip, and have had one planned party a month. At the same time, we have maintained an honor roll average for the entire school, having only two C’s out of the first semester final grades. We feel justly proud of this record and our volume of work through February, having sent in three hundred and fifty-four pieces of work, including daily exercises, tests, and final examinations.
We have taken advantage of our being in a foreign country. We are taking daily lessons in Italian. We conduct a monthly trip to study the different peoples, cities, and histories surrounding us. We know who the Etruscans were and how they influenced the history of Italy. We have studied about and visited such cities as the medieval cities of Volterra and Lucca, the Renaissance city of Florence, the modern towns of Viareggio, Carrera, and Montecatini. We know all the famous men of Livorno and the cause of its founding. We believe that we fully understand our debt to European legends, history, and culture.
In 1952-53, the principal was Virginia W. Richards, and there were two Italian teachers for the school. The high school, which consisted of twelve students (one Senior, three Juniors, three Sophomores, and five Freshman) had a Correspondence School Administrator.
There was a seventh-eighth grade combination class of nineteen students and a fifth-sixth combination class of thirty-one students. The third and fourth grades had classes of nineteen and twenty-four students. A first-second combo class had twenty-five students, and a first grade only class had twenty students. The morning and afternoon sections of kindergarten had twenty-seven and twenty students. The students at the school participated in intermural football as a school sport.
Richard Hostrop was the principal for the 1954-55 school year, and the school had students in kindergarten through ninth grade, with twenty-one faculty and staff. There were forty-eight students in grades seven through nine, sixty-eight in grades four through six, 151 in grades one through three, and fifty-three kindergarteners.
The school became Livorno Dependents School for the 1956-57 school year.
Information from yearbooks in the AOSHS archives