http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/education/27students.html
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
MILLINOCKET, Me. — Faced with dropping enrollment and revenue, the high school in this remote Maine town has pinned its hopes 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 Chinese students 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 only attend public high school in the United States for 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 only rarely traveled outside of New England, conceded that 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,” she 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.
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. “I told him, ‘Ken, I’d be jumping up and down with joy and happiness if 10 kids came the first year.’ But I love the fact that he is doing this really thoughtfully and well.”
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.
“They’re worried they’ll get bumped down,” said Morgan-Renee Lane, a senior at Stearns.
Other said the school was the town’s social hub, its football games, musicals and show choir concerts drawing crowds. Matthew Preble, 17, said he would welcome the Chinese students but could not help but wonder whether the Millinocket he loved 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.”
