AssassinsMace
Lieutenant General
October 26, 2010
Needing Students, Maine School Hunts in ChinaBy ABBY GOODNOUGH
MILLINOCKET, Me. — Faced with dropping enrollment and revenue, the high school in this remote Maine town has fixed on an unlikely source of salvation: Chinese teenagers.
Never mind that Millinocket is an hour’s drive from the nearest mall or movie theater, or that it gets an average 93 inches of snow a year. Kenneth Smith, the schools superintendent, is so certain that Chinese students will eventually arrive by the dozen — paying $27,000 a year in tuition, room and board — that he is scouting vacant properties to convert to dormitories.
“We are going full-bore,” Dr. Smith said last week in his office at the school, Stearns High, where the Chinese words for “hello” and “welcome” were displayed on the dry-erase board and a Lonely Planet China travel guide sat on the conference table. “You’ve got to move if you’ve got something you believe is the right thing to do.”
On Friday, Dr. Smith left for China, where he is spending a week pitching Stearns High to school officials, parents and students in Beijing, Shanghai and two other cities. He has hired a consultant to help him make connections in China, lobbied Millinocket’s elected officials and business owners to embrace the plan and even directed the school’s cafeteria workers to add Chinese food to the menu.
“We get some commodity pasta, and it makes a great lo mein,” said Kathy Civiello, the school’s nutrition director, one of the many staff members who appeared equally excited and bemused by the plan.
With China’s emergence as an economic juggernaut, colleges, universities and private secondary schools have tried to recruit students from China and have even opened campuses there. But Millinocket’s plan may be unprecedented among public schools, even as they scramble for new sources of revenue.
“This is the first we’ve even heard of it,” said Alexis Rice, a spokeswoman for the National School Boards Association.
There is one hitch. Under State Department rules, foreign students can attend public high school in the United States for only a year, a system that Dr. Smith considers unfair, given that they can attend private high schools for four years. He is pressing Maine’s Congressional delegation to seek a change, but in the meantime, he intends to recruit a handful of Chinese students to attend Stearns next year.
They would come to Millinocket for a year, Dr. Smith said, then perhaps transfer to a private school or enroll in an American college or university.
Dr. Smith, a native of Maine who has traveled outside New England only rarely, conceded he did not know much about China. But from what he had heard and read in recent months, he said, two things were clear: China had a large middle class with money to spend, and its students wanted to study here.
“They want to learn English, and they want a college education,” he said. “If we can get them into a college here, they will have achieved their major goal.”
Dr. Smith is so certain of success that it almost feels wrong to ask: Why would Chinese parents spend $27,000 to send their children to Stearns High, which is housed in a 1960s building, has only one Advanced Placement course and classroom maps so outdated they still show the Soviet Union, and where more than half of the 200 students are poor enough to qualify for free lunch?
“Our performing arts program is one of the best anywhere,” Dr. Smith said. “We have a tremendous music department and small classes with plenty of room. In China, you’re elbow to elbow.”
Fair enough. But why Millinocket, a town of 5,000 about 200 miles north of Portland, Me., that fell on hard times after its paper mill filed for bankruptcy in 2003? Vacant storefronts pock Penobscot Avenue, the main street, and the most popular hangout for teenagers is a supermarket parking lot.
“We’re a community full of assets,” Dr. Smith said, pointing to Mount Katahdin, Maine’s highest peak, which looms just beyond the town, and the abundant hunting, fishing and snow sport opportunities that the locals love. “There’s the beauty, No. 1, and the fresh air. And the roads are good.”
Terry Given, an English teacher who was born here, was more blunt.
“I don’t want to sound flip,” Ms. Given said, “but why not? We won’t know until we get the opportunity to know them and give them the opportunity to know us. There’s something to be said for putting ourselves out there to see if we can be the prize that’s claimed.”
At a time when shrinking budgets are forcing some public schools to require students to provide basic supplies like paper towels and soap, looking abroad for financial help may be an act of self-preservation. The enrollment at Stearns has fallen from about 700 students in the 1970s, when the paper mill provided hundreds of jobs. Over all, the number of students in all of Millinocket’s schools has dropped 43 percent since 2000, to 550 from 959.
Around the country, public schools can legally charge tuition to students who do not live in the district. Dr. Smith is basing the $27,000 fee on the district’s average spending per student, about $13,000 a year. He said $14,000 seemed reasonable for room and board based on what the state’s private schools charge for it.
Private schools, of course, have drawn students from abroad for decades, and a number of them in New England have recruited heavily from Asia in recent years.
“All of a sudden they have 60 Chinese kids in these tiny villages in Vermont,” said Suzanne Fox, the consultant who is working with Dr. Smith.
Ms. Fox, whose company, Fox Intercultural Consulting Services, helps businesses and schools build connections in China, said she had persuaded Dr. Smith to start slowly.
“I’ve had to rein him in a little bit,” Ms. Fox said, adding that his new goal was to recruit perhaps five students next fall instead of 100.
In the coming months, Ms. Fox will make frequent trips to Millinocket to teach students, teachers and community leaders about Chinese culture. The town is virtually all-white, though it has hosted traditional exchange students who come for a year without paying tuition.
“We’re pretty vanilla,” Ms. Given said. “Because we lack diversity, those who bring it into the community stick out like sore thumbs.”
Dr. Smith has also sought advice from a Chinese exchange student who he said was spending the year “with the undertaker’s family” in neighboring East Millinocket.
“I asked her what she most wanted to do while she was here,” he said. “She told me she wanted to go to Florida and see Disney World, go to Boston and shop, and climb the mountain.”
That would be Mount Katahdin. The school system owns a cabin at its base, which Dr. Smith hopes to use for weekend retreats, where Millinocket students can get to know their Chinese classmates. Students here seemed enthusiastic about the plan, though some, having heard that Chinese teenagers were academically driven, feared that their class ranking would slip.
Others said the school was the town’s social hub, its football games and musicals drawing crowds. Matthew Preble, 17, said he would welcome Chinese students but wondered whether Millinocket would feel the same.
“We’re used to Stearns High School being a small hometown type of thing,” he said. “The fact that suddenly we might have up to hundreds of kids from China might change that — in a good way, but we’re also kind of scared to lose our town.”
February 13
Millinocket schools prepare for tuition-paying Chinese
By Erin [email protected]
Staff Writer
Chinese students are not yet sitting in the public school classrooms of Millinocket, but the anticipation of their arrival has already struck a nerve across Maine and the nation.
Phone calls from the White House, Hollywood producers and parents in China are becoming regular occurrences at the Millinocket School District's office.
And educators are watching closely to see whether the idea that burgeoned in Millinocket — that tuition-paying international students can boost declining public schools' enrollment and revenue — becomes a nationwide trend.
"It's going to have a profound impact on public schools over the next few years," Millinocket Superintendent Kenneth Smith said.
The project, which aims to draw up to 20 Chinese students next fall who could each pay about $27,000 for tuition, room and board, is already making an impact on the northern Penobscot County town.
Smith, who resigned last summer as superintendent of the school district based in Anson and Bingham, has had at least seven requests from producers who want to film TV documentaries of Millinocket and its incoming Chinese students.
He has even received a call from Dr. Pat Basu, a fellow at the White House, who wanted to discuss how the federal government could help the project.
He also receives several phone calls weekly from parents in China, or from people in the U.S. on behalf of Chinese relatives, who want to send their children to high school in Millinocket. Many want to know whether the experience will help them get into a U.S. college, Smith said.
When The New York Times ran an article in October on Millinocket's plan to become the first public school system to accept tuition-paying foreign students, it received more hits online than any other article in the previous several months, the article's reporter told Suzanne Fox, president of Fox Intercultural Consulting Services.
Fox is helping to organize Millinocket's international program and to prepare students, community members and faculty for the foreign students' arrival.
"This was just a little project. Suddenly we're launched on the national scene," Fox said. "It was just an unbelievable response, from the White House, from producers, from documentary film makers, from educators. It was just crazy."
Schools in Wyoming and Hawaii have contacted Fox, asking how they, too, can set up similar international programs, she said. She's now working with the Maine Office of Tourism to translate tourist-related pamphlets into Chinese.
The project "just touched a nerve," Fox said. "Here's a town having a hard go. They had their heyday, and the mill closed, and it's not easy."
A handful of people have been resistant, she said, but "what else do you recommend? We need something."
Wade Merritt, vice president of the Maine International Trade Center in Portland, said there are likely a number of reasons for the national interest. One is that "it's the underdog story," he said.
It's also about China, a nation historically at odds with the U.S. "We're trying to figure out how we fit with the Chinese, and at a very basic level, that's what it is," he said.
The Millinocket project also has tapped into the growing population of foreign students already attending Maine's private schools, he said.
There are about 800 foreign students studying at Maine's private high schools, up from about 500 a couple years ago, he said. Interest is growing "substantially."
Thornton Academy in Saco first accepted about 40 international students in 2009, many of whom came from China. Their student numbers are growing as they add dormitories.
While the number of foreign students from other countries applying to Maine Central Institute in Pittsfield has declined, the number of Chinese students applying increased 70 percent over the last four years, Director of Admissions Clint Williams said. Eighty Chinese students currently attend the school.
"China is the automatic place that people are looking because there's a ton of kids, and they have the financial capacity to make it happen, and, quite honestly, they're great kids," Williams said.
China sends the largest number of college students to study at U.S. colleges and universities, according to the Institute of International Education. Chinese students represent 18.5 percent of all foreign college students. India is second, with 15.2 percent; South Korea, 10.4 percent.
Merritt said he'll be watching to see whether more public schools begin recruiting foreign students. Orono High School, a public school, is increasing its international student population next year, and Merritt said it's likely others will follow -- especially if federal regulations that limit a foreign student's stay to one year are lifted.
Of course introducing foreign students to a public school takes preparation.
The Millinocket district is trying to find a dormitory for the Chinese students, and during the next several months it will teach faculty, students and business owners about Chinese culture, Smith said. Stearns High School's library has been filled with books about China, and Asian food is served in the cafeteria at least once a week. An electronic information board has begun posting information about the country.
Smith and other Maine education leaders traveled to China in October to meet with heads of provinces, develop contacts and learn about China's school system. Smith is also lobbying Maine's congressional delegation to change the State Department rules that limit foreign students to one year of public school in the U.S. Foreign students can attend private schools for four years.
Smith looks at the project as a way to bridge two cultures, not just between Maine and China, but between the U.S. and China. "If we want to have something in the future, we've got to learn how to get along, far better than we do. We're intolerant of things we don't understand," he said.
Needing Students, Maine School Hunts in ChinaBy ABBY GOODNOUGH
MILLINOCKET, Me. — Faced with dropping enrollment and revenue, the high school in this remote Maine town has fixed on an unlikely source of salvation: Chinese teenagers.
Never mind that Millinocket is an hour’s drive from the nearest mall or movie theater, or that it gets an average 93 inches of snow a year. Kenneth Smith, the schools superintendent, is so certain that Chinese students will eventually arrive by the dozen — paying $27,000 a year in tuition, room and board — that he is scouting vacant properties to convert to dormitories.
“We are going full-bore,” Dr. Smith said last week in his office at the school, Stearns High, where the Chinese words for “hello” and “welcome” were displayed on the dry-erase board and a Lonely Planet China travel guide sat on the conference table. “You’ve got to move if you’ve got something you believe is the right thing to do.”
On Friday, Dr. Smith left for China, where he is spending a week pitching Stearns High to school officials, parents and students in Beijing, Shanghai and two other cities. He has hired a consultant to help him make connections in China, lobbied Millinocket’s elected officials and business owners to embrace the plan and even directed the school’s cafeteria workers to add Chinese food to the menu.
“We get some commodity pasta, and it makes a great lo mein,” said Kathy Civiello, the school’s nutrition director, one of the many staff members who appeared equally excited and bemused by the plan.
With China’s emergence as an economic juggernaut, colleges, universities and private secondary schools have tried to recruit students from China and have even opened campuses there. But Millinocket’s plan may be unprecedented among public schools, even as they scramble for new sources of revenue.
“This is the first we’ve even heard of it,” said Alexis Rice, a spokeswoman for the National School Boards Association.
There is one hitch. Under State Department rules, foreign students can attend public high school in the United States for only a year, a system that Dr. Smith considers unfair, given that they can attend private high schools for four years. He is pressing Maine’s Congressional delegation to seek a change, but in the meantime, he intends to recruit a handful of Chinese students to attend Stearns next year.
They would come to Millinocket for a year, Dr. Smith said, then perhaps transfer to a private school or enroll in an American college or university.
Dr. Smith, a native of Maine who has traveled outside New England only rarely, conceded he did not know much about China. But from what he had heard and read in recent months, he said, two things were clear: China had a large middle class with money to spend, and its students wanted to study here.
“They want to learn English, and they want a college education,” he said. “If we can get them into a college here, they will have achieved their major goal.”
Dr. Smith is so certain of success that it almost feels wrong to ask: Why would Chinese parents spend $27,000 to send their children to Stearns High, which is housed in a 1960s building, has only one Advanced Placement course and classroom maps so outdated they still show the Soviet Union, and where more than half of the 200 students are poor enough to qualify for free lunch?
“Our performing arts program is one of the best anywhere,” Dr. Smith said. “We have a tremendous music department and small classes with plenty of room. In China, you’re elbow to elbow.”
Fair enough. But why Millinocket, a town of 5,000 about 200 miles north of Portland, Me., that fell on hard times after its paper mill filed for bankruptcy in 2003? Vacant storefronts pock Penobscot Avenue, the main street, and the most popular hangout for teenagers is a supermarket parking lot.
“We’re a community full of assets,” Dr. Smith said, pointing to Mount Katahdin, Maine’s highest peak, which looms just beyond the town, and the abundant hunting, fishing and snow sport opportunities that the locals love. “There’s the beauty, No. 1, and the fresh air. And the roads are good.”
Terry Given, an English teacher who was born here, was more blunt.
“I don’t want to sound flip,” Ms. Given said, “but why not? We won’t know until we get the opportunity to know them and give them the opportunity to know us. There’s something to be said for putting ourselves out there to see if we can be the prize that’s claimed.”
At a time when shrinking budgets are forcing some public schools to require students to provide basic supplies like paper towels and soap, looking abroad for financial help may be an act of self-preservation. The enrollment at Stearns has fallen from about 700 students in the 1970s, when the paper mill provided hundreds of jobs. Over all, the number of students in all of Millinocket’s schools has dropped 43 percent since 2000, to 550 from 959.
Around the country, public schools can legally charge tuition to students who do not live in the district. Dr. Smith is basing the $27,000 fee on the district’s average spending per student, about $13,000 a year. He said $14,000 seemed reasonable for room and board based on what the state’s private schools charge for it.
Private schools, of course, have drawn students from abroad for decades, and a number of them in New England have recruited heavily from Asia in recent years.
“All of a sudden they have 60 Chinese kids in these tiny villages in Vermont,” said Suzanne Fox, the consultant who is working with Dr. Smith.
Ms. Fox, whose company, Fox Intercultural Consulting Services, helps businesses and schools build connections in China, said she had persuaded Dr. Smith to start slowly.
“I’ve had to rein him in a little bit,” Ms. Fox said, adding that his new goal was to recruit perhaps five students next fall instead of 100.
In the coming months, Ms. Fox will make frequent trips to Millinocket to teach students, teachers and community leaders about Chinese culture. The town is virtually all-white, though it has hosted traditional exchange students who come for a year without paying tuition.
“We’re pretty vanilla,” Ms. Given said. “Because we lack diversity, those who bring it into the community stick out like sore thumbs.”
Dr. Smith has also sought advice from a Chinese exchange student who he said was spending the year “with the undertaker’s family” in neighboring East Millinocket.
“I asked her what she most wanted to do while she was here,” he said. “She told me she wanted to go to Florida and see Disney World, go to Boston and shop, and climb the mountain.”
That would be Mount Katahdin. The school system owns a cabin at its base, which Dr. Smith hopes to use for weekend retreats, where Millinocket students can get to know their Chinese classmates. Students here seemed enthusiastic about the plan, though some, having heard that Chinese teenagers were academically driven, feared that their class ranking would slip.
Others said the school was the town’s social hub, its football games and musicals drawing crowds. Matthew Preble, 17, said he would welcome Chinese students but wondered whether Millinocket would feel the same.
“We’re used to Stearns High School being a small hometown type of thing,” he said. “The fact that suddenly we might have up to hundreds of kids from China might change that — in a good way, but we’re also kind of scared to lose our town.”
February 13
Millinocket schools prepare for tuition-paying Chinese
By Erin [email protected]
Staff Writer
Chinese students are not yet sitting in the public school classrooms of Millinocket, but the anticipation of their arrival has already struck a nerve across Maine and the nation.
Phone calls from the White House, Hollywood producers and parents in China are becoming regular occurrences at the Millinocket School District's office.
And educators are watching closely to see whether the idea that burgeoned in Millinocket — that tuition-paying international students can boost declining public schools' enrollment and revenue — becomes a nationwide trend.
"It's going to have a profound impact on public schools over the next few years," Millinocket Superintendent Kenneth Smith said.
The project, which aims to draw up to 20 Chinese students next fall who could each pay about $27,000 for tuition, room and board, is already making an impact on the northern Penobscot County town.
Smith, who resigned last summer as superintendent of the school district based in Anson and Bingham, has had at least seven requests from producers who want to film TV documentaries of Millinocket and its incoming Chinese students.
He has even received a call from Dr. Pat Basu, a fellow at the White House, who wanted to discuss how the federal government could help the project.
He also receives several phone calls weekly from parents in China, or from people in the U.S. on behalf of Chinese relatives, who want to send their children to high school in Millinocket. Many want to know whether the experience will help them get into a U.S. college, Smith said.
When The New York Times ran an article in October on Millinocket's plan to become the first public school system to accept tuition-paying foreign students, it received more hits online than any other article in the previous several months, the article's reporter told Suzanne Fox, president of Fox Intercultural Consulting Services.
Fox is helping to organize Millinocket's international program and to prepare students, community members and faculty for the foreign students' arrival.
"This was just a little project. Suddenly we're launched on the national scene," Fox said. "It was just an unbelievable response, from the White House, from producers, from documentary film makers, from educators. It was just crazy."
Schools in Wyoming and Hawaii have contacted Fox, asking how they, too, can set up similar international programs, she said. She's now working with the Maine Office of Tourism to translate tourist-related pamphlets into Chinese.
The project "just touched a nerve," Fox said. "Here's a town having a hard go. They had their heyday, and the mill closed, and it's not easy."
A handful of people have been resistant, she said, but "what else do you recommend? We need something."
Wade Merritt, vice president of the Maine International Trade Center in Portland, said there are likely a number of reasons for the national interest. One is that "it's the underdog story," he said.
It's also about China, a nation historically at odds with the U.S. "We're trying to figure out how we fit with the Chinese, and at a very basic level, that's what it is," he said.
The Millinocket project also has tapped into the growing population of foreign students already attending Maine's private schools, he said.
There are about 800 foreign students studying at Maine's private high schools, up from about 500 a couple years ago, he said. Interest is growing "substantially."
Thornton Academy in Saco first accepted about 40 international students in 2009, many of whom came from China. Their student numbers are growing as they add dormitories.
While the number of foreign students from other countries applying to Maine Central Institute in Pittsfield has declined, the number of Chinese students applying increased 70 percent over the last four years, Director of Admissions Clint Williams said. Eighty Chinese students currently attend the school.
"China is the automatic place that people are looking because there's a ton of kids, and they have the financial capacity to make it happen, and, quite honestly, they're great kids," Williams said.
China sends the largest number of college students to study at U.S. colleges and universities, according to the Institute of International Education. Chinese students represent 18.5 percent of all foreign college students. India is second, with 15.2 percent; South Korea, 10.4 percent.
Merritt said he'll be watching to see whether more public schools begin recruiting foreign students. Orono High School, a public school, is increasing its international student population next year, and Merritt said it's likely others will follow -- especially if federal regulations that limit a foreign student's stay to one year are lifted.
Of course introducing foreign students to a public school takes preparation.
The Millinocket district is trying to find a dormitory for the Chinese students, and during the next several months it will teach faculty, students and business owners about Chinese culture, Smith said. Stearns High School's library has been filled with books about China, and Asian food is served in the cafeteria at least once a week. An electronic information board has begun posting information about the country.
Smith and other Maine education leaders traveled to China in October to meet with heads of provinces, develop contacts and learn about China's school system. Smith is also lobbying Maine's congressional delegation to change the State Department rules that limit foreign students to one year of public school in the U.S. Foreign students can attend private schools for four years.
Smith looks at the project as a way to bridge two cultures, not just between Maine and China, but between the U.S. and China. "If we want to have something in the future, we've got to learn how to get along, far better than we do. We're intolerant of things we don't understand," he said.
