From La Casa to School Guardian: Jimena’s Aiglon Journey

In 2018, a 10-year-old girl arrived at Aiglon College from Andorra speaking almost no English. She was assigned to La Casa, the junior girls’ boarding house. 

Unaccustomed to boarding life when she first arrived, she cried most evenings. She began to adjust, slowly, and slipped notes under the houseparent’s door listing two or three good things that had happened each day.

And despite her initial fears, she told that same houseparent, somewhere in the middle of it all, she intended to become a school guardian one day.

Last year, she did.

From Junior School to School Guardian 

Jimena came to Aiglon because of her sister, who had arrived for what was meant to be six months and stayed eight years.

“Seeing her so happy and making so many friendships made me want to come,” Jimena says. “And I really wanted to learn English.” 

Neither goal came easily at first. Boarding school was not a common path in Andorra, and leaving home at age 10 was hard on the whole family. “My family was nervous,” she says. “But once they saw how happy I was, they were happy too.” 

The early weeks, though, were anything but easy. Fran Luco, La Casa houseparent and the person who would become central to Jimena’s first years at Aiglon, remembers it clearly.

“She cried every day for a long time,” Ms Luco says. “And every time her mother came to visit, separating them was like pulling two people apart.” 

For Jimena, Ms Luco was a lifeline.

Life in La Casa 

La Casa is more than a boarding house, it's a little family tucked in a corner of Aiglon's campus. The design of the house lends itself to being a cosy and safe place for the girls to return to after a busy day, usually with freshly baked treats awaiting their arrival.

“Ms Luco was like a mother figure,” she admits. “She was always free to have a cup of tea with me. She made me write little notes every day, two or three good things about the day. She was always very welcoming.” 

The fact that Ms Luco spoke Spanish helped enormously. On the days Ms Luco was not on duty, Jimena struggled. On the days she was, Jimena found her way to the houseparent apartment most evenings.

The best advice Ms Luco gave her was to join in. “Ms Luco kept telling me to go on expeditions, sign up for activities, and build friendships,” Jimena says. “I was scared at the beginning. I thought the girls weren't going to like me, that I wouldn’t fit in. But when I started building those friendships, everything really did change.”

Ms Luco had seen it coming, even when Jimena hadn’t. “Very early on, in floods of tears, she told me she would be a guardian one day in La Casa, ”she says. “I didn’t take it entirely seriously at the time. But her determination was so clear.” 

Aiglon Student Guardians' 

Aiglon’s two ‘Guardians’ are students selected each year from the school prefect group. Normally a boy and a girl, they embody Aiglon’s ethos and lead the student body for the academic year.

Mentoring Younger Students 

Years later, Jimena returned to La Casa not as a homesick new girl but as an academic peer mentor, helping younger students, many of them navigating the same language barriers she once had, with their reading and speaking.

“I know how it feels not to be able to get your words through easily,” says Jimena.

“Going back to help with that felt very important.”

The connection between La Casa and the senior school is something Ms Luco works hard to maintain. Former girls visit regularly, give tours and bring treats. A photograph of Jimena in the La Casa common room draws regular questions from the current girls.

”They always ask: is that Jimena”; Ms Luco says. “Seeing someone who was once a little girl in La Casa go on to become school guardian means something to them.”

For Jimena, the transformation has been personal as much as it has been institutional.

“When she first came, she was very shy, very reluctant to take risks,” confesses Ms Luco. ”But nobody in this school would describe her that way today.” 

Advice from the School Guardian 

Boarding school, Jimena says, has taught her to engage with every opportunity and to work through disagreements rather than avoid them.

“Living with 56 girls, things don’t always run smoothly,” she says. “It’s about how you talk things through. Like sisters.” 

Her advice to any La Casa girl with guardian ambitions is direct: “Take part in everything and give back for everything that’s given to you. You have to touch all the aspects of Aiglon. And don't expect to get there overnight—the path starts long before.” 

Ms Luco puts it just as plainly. “You don’t become a guardian from one day to the next. “The history you build in the school is what takes you there in the end.”