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When grade-schoolers Antoine and Ariane Bisaillon head off for class each morning, they don't only tote along their books and lunchboxes. They pack their passports.

The brother and sister from Quebec get into the car with their mother and drive to the U.S. border. The border guard checks their student visas and passports, and the family continues down the road to the childrens' elementary school in New York State.

The children, aged 6 and 10, are part of a small but growing phenomenon in some border communities in Quebec: cross-border pupils going to school in English in the U.S.

“You have to speak at least two languages nowadays to open doors,” the children's mother, Chantal Bisaillon, said yesterday. “Preserving the French language is very important to me. We speak French at home. But English is important too.”

This year, 33 children from Quebec, virtually all francophones, are enrolled in pre-kindergarten to Grade 6 at St. Mary's Academy – a private, English-language school in Champlain, N.Y., 2.5 kilometres from the Canadian border.

Principal Sister Marie Cordata said the number of Quebec students at her school has ballooned from only three in 2002.

Today, Quebeckers make up nearly a third of her 102 students. And while parents are drawn to the school's Catholic values and small class size, most are there to learn a second language.

“The parents want their children to be bilingual,” she said. “I see that they love their French language, but they want to have every door open to them.”

Many are like the Bisaillon family. They are required under Quebec law to send their children to public school in French. Her local schools offer one to two hours of English instruction a week, which Mrs. Bisaillon says isn't sufficient to give her children a good base in the language.

The family could also legally send their children to a non-subsidized English private school in the province; but the nearest one to the Bisaillons costs $9,000 a year in tuition. Tuition at St. Mary's is $2,275 U.S. – a bargain with the strong loonie, Mrs. Bisaillon says.

And so the 35-year-old mother joins other families from border communities like Hemmingford, Lacolle and her hometown of Napierville and makes a 25-minute commute to school. On her way, Mrs. Bisaillon picks up her neighbours' six-year-old daughter, Mathilde Laflamme.

“English is more and more important for work, and we want our daughter to have that tool,” said Mathilde's mother, Julie Grenier, who also felt the amount of English instruction in the area's public schools was insufficient. “The French language occupies a very important place in our family. But in the current context, you won't advance in the job market with French only. We don't want our children to suffer from that.”

The parents appear to be operating in a legally murky zone. Under Quebec law, parents may opt out of sending their children to school if they educate them at home, and obtain permission from their local school board to do so.

Not all the parents sending their children to St. Mary's informed their boards they were home-schooling their children. As for those who did, the law doesn't state that parents can say they're home-schooling their children while really sending them to school south of the border.

“I find it worrisome,” said Claude Boivin, director-general of a school board near the U.S. border. She said that if the parents were mainly sending their children to the U.S. to become bilingual, she would have preferred they tried to propose reforms in Quebec, such as increasing the amount of English instruction.

A spokesman for Quebec Education Minister Michelle Courchesne says it's the first time he's heard about Quebec parents sending school-age children to the U.S. “It's really a new phenomenon,” said Jean-Pascal Bernier.

Meanwhile, the cross-border students from Quebec have also brought advantages to St. Mary's, the principal said. With so many young francophones, some of the American schoolchildren are learning French.