Montpelier, and other Vermont schools, are looking to China in an effort to add cultural diversity, fill empty seats and bring in tuition dollars.
MHS Principal Adam Bunting and Anne Watson, a teacher who is also a Montpelier City Council member, visited to the Statehouse to explain the school’s outreach to attract students from China.
Plans call for students to attend the high school and to live in dormitory space to be leased from the Vermont College of Fine Arts.
Watson said other states have turned to foreign students to address their declining enrollments.
“Some public schools in Maine and New York have started boarding programs in which international students stay only one year,” Watson said. “Montpelier High School is ideally positioned to start such a boarding program. Vermont College of Fine Arts has excess dorm space, a cafeteria that already serves three meals a day, and most importantly, they’re enthusiastic about partnering with us. The big pieces of this puzzle are coming together, but there are many details to work out yet.”
Watson was recently chosen for a Rowland Foundation Fellowship to work on the program, she and Bunting told the senators.
Sen. Bill Doyle, R-Washington, vice-chairman of the Senate Education Committee, arranged the visits from local school officials.
Watson said that using her recently awarded Rowland Fellowship she and stakeholders “…will put together the logistical, legal, financial, recruitment and hospitality details of starting a public boarding program. I hope to collect best practices from successful boarding programs, and document our program in such a way that it could serve as a model for other schools. Montpelier stands to substantially benefit financially and culturally from this program, and it may be a solution for other Vermont schools as well.”
The Senate adopted a resolution to celebrate the program, “encouraging public high schools to explore recruiting and enrolling international students on F-1 student visas in order to promote tuition-based income.”
Watson compared Montpelier’s efforts to St. Johnsbury Academy’s international program.
“It’s an exciting time,” Watson said. “We believe that it’s time for public schools to start considering ways of starting to bring revenue both to the school and to the state itself.”
The Rowland Foundation gives the school and Watson the seed money to launch the program and invest in its creation.
“We’re looking at what other models exist, St. Johnsbury Academy and Lyndon Institute,” among them, Watson said.
One important distinction is that federal law prohibits international students from attending a public school for longer than one year, “so that turnover (of international students) just happens every year.”
The goal is for 20 students to start the program, and dorm parents would be hired to live at VCFA.
Watson said she will study schools with experience hosting and educating international students, as well as the legal, financial, logistic, recruitment and hospitality aspects of the plans.
The expected costs for tuition and living expenses, dorm, meals, etc., is in the $40,000 range, Watson said. The anticipated tuition for attending Montpelier High School would be $16,000.
Bunting said the program would let the students from China “see the best of what Vermont has to offer.”
Sen. David Zuckerman, P/D-Chittenden, said access to the Vermont Statehouse and the legislative session in Montpelier could be an added bonus for students who want to see democracy in action.
According to the Senate resolution, international student enrollment in U.S. public and private high schools has grown from 6,500 in 2007 to 65,000 in 2012 as more students seek to improve their English skills and enter U.S. colleges.
