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GENEVA: Swiss families priced out of Geneva and forced to live just across the border in France are reeling from another blow: their children are now being elbowed out of Genevan schools.
The Geneva authorities’ decision to bar pupils who live in the Swiss city’s surrounding French suburbs and villages has left parents angry, children worried, and French municipalities fuming at having to absorb more than 2,000 extra kids into their classrooms.
“We’ve become second-class Swiss citizens,” lamented Joana, a 35-year-old mother of two, declining to give her surname for professional reasons.
Like many cross-border commuters, Joana, who works in health care, left Geneva due to the lack of affordable housing.
“We agreed to leave our sub-standard home in the city center to move to the countryside – but crossing the border was conditional on access to Swiss schools,” she said.
Home to numerous international institutions, Geneva is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in.
Its position is geographically curious: the Swiss city is almost entirely surrounded by France. Nowhere in the Geneva canton is more than 5.5 kilometers from the French border.
Around 115,000 people work in Geneva but live across the border, where the cost of living is cheaper.
‘We’re not happy’
The French village of Bossey is home to cross-border workers, many of them Swiss nationals who cannot afford to live in Geneva.
Its mayor, Jean-Luc Pecorini, can see the border from his office, less than 100 meters away on the other side of the highway.
“We’re not happy,” he said, evoking a sentiment shared by other French mayors.
He called Geneva’s decision – taken in June and coming into force at the start of the next school year in September 2026 – “abrupt.”
Opening a new classroom would cost around €80,000 ($93,000), he explained.
A source with knowledge of the figures, who did not want to be identified, said around 2,500 pupils would initially be affected, followed by “a steady stream of students” who would otherwise have gone to Swiss schools later on.
While some are French, 80 percent of those affected are Swiss.
The financial consequences for France are estimated at around €60 million in schooling and infrastructure costs, plus another €15 million a year thereafter, the source said.
Geneva’s demographic growth
Geneva is refusing to budge, citing demographic pressure and a shortage of school places.
The change represents “a saving of just over 27 million Swiss francs ($34 million) over four years,” the Genevan authorities said.
Roberto Balsa, a 47-year-old cross-border IT worker, said the news was “very brutal” for his seven-year-old daughter.
Some parents have filed legal appeals in Geneva, while others have signed an online petition.
Emmanuel, a father of four affected by the decision, who did not want to give his surname, called Geneva’s attitude “discriminatory,” noting that so-called “frontalier” workers like himself pay their taxes in Switzerland, with only a third remitted to France.
France’s Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes regional prefecture said that French authorities “can no longer accept” Geneva shifting the impact of its problems onto neighboring France “without any real consideration of the financial impact.”
By kicking out pupils, most of whom are Swiss and intend to work in Switzerland, “Geneva is exporting the burden of schooling to France, while our schools are already under severe pressure in terms of capacity,” it said.

LLANOS DE CHALLE NATIONAL PARK, Chile: A rare bloom in Chile’s Atacama Desert has briefly transformed one of the world’s driest places into a dazzling carpet of fuchsia-colored wildflowers.
The arid region — considered the driest nonpolar desert on Earth, averaging around 2 millimeters (0.08 inches) of rainfall a year — was a riot of color this week after unusual downpours throughout the Southern Hemisphere’s winter months soaked the desert foothills and highlands.
Experts describe 2025 as among the Atacama’s wettest in recent years, with some high-elevation borderlands receiving up to 60 millimeters of rain (2.3 inches) in July and August.
Seeds from more than 200 flower species sit in the red and rocky soil of the Atacama Desert all year, awaiting the winter rains, said Víctor Ardiles, chief curator of botany at Chile’s National Museum of Natural History.
Moisture from the Amazon basin arrives to the desert’s eastern fringes as modest rainfall, and from the Pacific Ocean to its coastline as dense fog. Dormant seeds must store up at least 15 millimeters (0.6 inches) of water to germinate.
“When certain moisture thresholds are met, (the seeds) activate, grow and then bloom,” Ardiles said.
Yet even then there’s no guarantee that brightly colored bulbs will explode through the soil.
“There are four key factors that determine whether this process reaches the seed – water, temperature, daylight and humidity,” Ardiles added.
“Not all the seeds will germinate, some will remain waiting … a portion will make it to the next generation, while others will be left behind along life’s path.”
The main threads in the floral carpet are pink and purple. But yellow, red, blue and white strands emerge as well.
Tourists flocked to the northern desert in recent days to marvel at the short-lived flower show. Some even trek from Chile’s capital, Santiago, 800 kilometers (497 miles) south of the Copiapó region.
Most flowers will have vanished by November, as summer sets in. But more drought-resistant species can stick around until January.
“It’s one of those rare things you have to take advantage of,” said Maritza Barrera, 44, who hit the road with her two kids for almost six hours to catch the desert bloom in the Llanos de Challe National Park last week. “It’s more stunning than I could have imagined.”
Recognizing the ephemeral desert flowers as a conservation priority, Chilean President Gabriel Boric minted a new national park further inland in 2023, converting about 220 square miles (570 square kilometers) of flower fields along the Pan-American Highway into Desert Bloom National Park.
“Nowhere on Earth does this phenomenon occur like it does here in Chile,” Ardiles said.