Plans fell through
Ying Ying Brown, far left, of Dresden helped train these Wiscasset High School students as “ambassadors” for Chinese students. Students pictured, beginning second from left, are Alyssa Urquhart of Alna, Michaela Trudeau of Wiscasset, Logan Grover of Wiscasset, Cameron Mugnai of Alna and, in back, Cormac Walsh of Wiscasset.
Ying Ying Brown, far left, of Dresden helped train these Wiscasset High School students as “ambassadors” for Chinese students. Students pictured, beginning second from left, are Alyssa Urquhart of Alna, Michaela Trudeau of Wiscasset, Logan Grover of Wiscasset, Cameron Mugnai of Alna and, in back, Cormac Walsh of Wiscasset.
Plans have been scrapped for three Chinese students to attend Wiscasset High School this year. Their prospective host families all had personal situations come up that left them unable to make the commitment, Principal Deb Taylor said.
The loss of the host families was known by the end of the last school year, but the Chinese students are “very academically driven” and couldn't wait for the school to try to secure other families, Taylor said.
The benefits of the students' year here would have been multifold, according to Taylor and others interviewed: mutual cultural enrichment for Wiscasset High students and their classmates from China; for the Chinese students, a leg up on attending a U.S. college; and revenue for Regional School Unit 12 from the tuition.
The district would have gotten a total of about $45,000 if the three students had come this school year, Finance Manager Belinda Waterhouse said. The loss will not impact programs, because the district had not been counting on that tuition to cover specific budget costs, Waterhouse said.
A group of Wiscasset High students trained last year to serve as “ambassadors” for the Chinese students. “We were all so excited during training,” junior Michaela Trudeau said. “It was a really big disappointment hearing they couldn't come.”
“This was a huge chance for them to experience a totally different educational system,” senior Cormac Walsh said. As part of his training he learned that compared to American schools Chinese schools allow little time for students to interact with one another.
Dresden resident Ying Ying Brown, who helped train the ambassadors, agreed the year would have been a new social and educational experience for the students from her native China, and been good for the local teens. Many young Americans think of China only as a place that makes many of the products they buy, Brown said. The change of plans was “kind of sad,” she said. “I hope this is not the end.”
Taylor doesn't plan for it to be. She intends to try again to get Chinese students here for the 2013-2014 school year.
“We're very much in the initial phase of building relationships with China with an eye toward the future,” Taylor said. “I remain convinced that it's the right thing.”
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