On Mar. 5, eight students from Liceo Angela Veronese High School, located in Montebelluna, Italy, came to BVH for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic. This visit was part of a student exchange program in cooperation with Hilltop High school, which is recognized as a Foreign Language and Global Studies (FLAGS) school.
Hilltop experienced difficulty securing enough host homes for the exchange students to stay at, so Italian teacher, Robert Pirazzini, and French teacher Patrick Beaulieu, took up the challenge–from plane fare, background checks and paperwork–to bring these students to BVH.
Junior Brooklyn Bennett took part in this exchange by hosting an exchange student herself. “From [learning] what life is [like] back home, to what she is most excited for, the exchange has been nothing short of amazing,” Bennett said. “Student exchanges are so impactful, especially to me. Having taken Italian for three years, really being immersed in the culture and connecting what I have learned to real life is so special.”
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, BVH students had many more opportunities to visit other countries as well as host students from other countries. Pirazzini explained that the exchange program had previously existed for 15 years at BVH, where students would host in the fall and get to go to the exchange student’s school in the spring. The pandemic proved difficult to work through as schools shut down and people were forced into distance learning. However, even after students and staff returned to school, and life essentially went back to normal, acquiring the assistance and funding needed to host these students proved challenging for BVH and the district as a whole.
“There are many administrative barriers. Our counterparts in Italy and France, for example, [take] care of all the details and money involved in the exchange,” Beaulieu said. “Here, we do not receive any support from the school. We have to organize the arrangements for staying in the homes, the bus [fare,] museum trips, collecting money and [conducting] background checks.”
During period four on Mar. 6, the exchange students participated in a fun activity with the French three/four class in order to strengthen their communication skills. They were asked questions such as, “What is your favorite music artist?” or “What is a stereotype you have about America?” in order to better get to know them as individuals. In turn, these students got to ask similar questions in English. However, facilitating a cultural exchange across countries comes with many challenges.
“The biggest obstacle is the amount of paperwork,” Pirazzini remarked. “It has become more and more difficult every year, [it] just became too much.”
Despite the challenges faced, students agree that the time and effort invested does pay off. “I think the school should definitely invest into more of these exchanges and continue for more years to come. Not only with the Italian class but other language [and] culture classes we have on campus as well,” Bennett said.
There is something to be said about the effort on all fronts to conduct cross-continental events like these. The enrichment students receive from practicing their learned language with locals and having the opportunity to visit the country that speaks the language itself is reason enough to devote more resources to facilitation of these events. At a time, these resources did exist. “There was one year the principal had some of the secretaries in the office helping and that [lessened the load] tremendously,” Pirazzini explained. More aid from the school and the district itself would directly contribute to hosting these exchanges annually again, thus nurturing community between the student body and international students.
“I think that these cultural exchanges are really important. It [makes] people think differently and it really satisfies our school mission statement when it says that more or less we are an international community fostering international awareness,” Beaulieu remarked. “We say it in words, but do we do it?”
