Schools of Import

For over 200 years, Maine’s private high schools, called town academies, have dotted the landscape from the northern woods to the southern shores. In 1852, there were 64 town academies; now there are 10. The ones that have thrived have done so despite great odds, including economic downturns, the increasing number of public high schools, and a declining school-age population.

Out of the 5,500 students Maine’s town academies serve, most are local residents, and their tuitions are publicly funded. Some of these Maine students are from nearby “sending towns” that don’t have their own public high school, and pay the tuitions of students who choose to attend the academy.

But there is a new wave of students springing up at these academies—private-pay boarding students, most from overseas. Four town academies in our region have some of the largest boarding student populations in the state. During the 2008–2009 school year, Maine Central Institute had just over 100 private tuition students, Washington Academy had 99, Lee had 80, and Foxcroft Academy had 57. These tuition dollars allow these schools to offer curriculum choices you won’t find at many of Maine’s public high schools, from Latin to boatbuilding to ballet.

The financial value of having boarding students attend these academies has been significant—in some cases it has literally saved the school. But the educational value of having students from all over the globe study alongside students in rural Maine—a place where there isn’t much diversity—is priceless.

Lee, Maine’s “Little United Nations”

Between classes, the view outside the office window of Lee Academy headmaster Bruce Lindberg looks a bit like the parade of nations during the opening ceremony for the Olympics. Last year, students from 11 countries attended Lee Academy, including Vietnam, Israel, Germany, Great Britain, Australia, and Mexico.

Visualized in context, the view is even more surprising—this cultural mix of energetic high-schoolers is living and learning in Lee, Maine, a quiet, secluded town of just 850 residents.

Incorporated in 1845, Lee Academy began as a school to train teachers for the many rural schools in eastern Maine. The school’s 85-year-old Academy Building has staircases worn by gen-erations of students, though the original hardwood floors still gleam every fall after a good polish. Over the years, the rest of the academy has spilled into the town itself: The dining hall was once a hunting lodge, a girls’ dorm was a store, and the Cobb Center was originally a Baptist church. The academy’s chorus and band now practice in the sanctuary.

The influx of international students has put Lee Academy at nearly full enrollment. It’s a place of abundance that may have seemed impossible a decade ago. In the 1990s, the school saw day-student enrollment drop by 30%. Facing closure, Lee Academy began to aggressively recruit international students to keep enrollment steady and to bring in additional tuition dollars. It worked. Now, years later, the school refers to itself as a “little United Nations.” In 2009, Lindberg says, “for the first time, our day students and boarding students have been 50/50.”

Another ratio, the low student-to-teacher ratio, is an important recruitment tool. So are the small classes. “Back in Israel,” says student Samer Jassar, “if you ask a question, you can only ask one. But here you can ask 20.”

A fellow student from Vietnam, Vu Phan, agrees. “With 10 to 15 students in a class, everybody is free to have a discussion, which is a good experience,” he says. “Classrooms back in Vietnam have one teacher and 42 students. We just sit all day and listen.”

Lindberg recalls how the benefits of Lee Academy’s small class size and international mix became clear in a recent U.S. history class, during a unit on the Vietnam War. “There were first person experiences shared by the teacher, who was a Vietnam veteran, and students from Southeast Asia, whose families were directly affected by the war,” Lindberg says. “You won’t find that in a textbook.”

Foxcroft’s New Home Away from Home

Dover-Foxcroft is the kind of tree-lined small town that Americans write songs about, a place where everyone knows each other, and school sports reign supreme. It’s also seen its hardships. Over the past decade, the loss of such manufacturing companies as Dexter Shoe, Pride Manufacturing, and Lucid Manufacturing due to global competition brought a dramatic drop in the area’s population and tax base.

Foxcroft Academy, founded in 1823, began participating in “the global economy” in its own way, when it began recruiting international, tuition-paying students in 2000.

Like at Lee Academy, these students quickly helped change the financial tide for Foxcroft Academy—so much so, that the school just completed a $7 million dormitory to house its international boarding students. Last month, five faculty members and their families, as well as 48 students, moved into their new home.

One of those students is Ina Chung from South Korea, who lived with a host family last year. While she’s excited about living in the new dorm—which features large student rooms with views overlooking the football field, and a common room with a huge slate fireplace—she’s most happy about the 141 course offerings she can choose from at Foxcroft Academy. “We don’t get to choose what we study back in South Korea. Everyone takes the same classes,” Chung says. While she studied English back home, attending Foxcroft Academy has helped her pronunciation and will, she hopes, help her get into Colby College.

If it weren’t for students like Chung, Foxcroft Academy would likely have far fewer courses and extracurricular activities. Over the 2007–2008 school year, only 52% of expected revenue came from the local SAD 68 community. Tuition students make the critical difference, says head of school Vandy Hewett. “The additional revenue allows us to ensure that the breadth of academic programming historically provided to our local students remains strong,” she says. Due to growth in the boarding program, for instance, Foxcroft has been able to add Chinese as the fourth foreign language offered to students, an important language in today’s global marketplace.

Though Foxcroft Academy looked beyond Maine to address its enrollment crisis a decade ago, it stayed close to home when it came to constructing its new dorm. “A $7 million building project in southern Piscataquis County is an important project for our region,” Hewett says. That’s why Foxcroft Academy’s board of trustees made a conscious decision to use as many local contractors and businesses as possible. In the end, 12 different local businesses became involved in the project, including Pleasant River Lumber, Webber Hardware, Robinson Oil, and electrical work done by Stevens Electric.

The dormitory also has bragging rights the entire community can be proud of: The school used bond financing and donations to fund the construction. No tax dollars were used.

Foxcroft Academy’s new dorm was a necessary investment. The boarding population had increased by 50% over the past two years, and there were also 25 students on the waiting list for admission this summer. Until this year, boarding students had been living in three smaller boarding houses close to campus, as well as with host families. The dorm also opens up a potential new market for Foxcroft Academy: U.S. boarding students. At present, all boarders are international students.

Tim Smith, Foxcroft Academy’s athletic director, moved his family—his wife and three chidren, ages 6, 3, and 1—into the new dorm at the end of July. He had been a dorm parent for the past five years, living with 11 boys and having to cook meals for all of them. Students living in the new dorm will have their meals served in the school’s dining hall.

Besides not having to cook for a large crew, Smith also likes living in a more community-centered dorm, which includes new condo-like apartments for dorm parents. “The architects did a good job designing the apartment to make them desirable to live in,” he says. “It has a good floor plan and modern appliances. I think it’s going to help retaining dorm parents as well as students.”

Smith and his wife also “like the impact the international students have on our three children,” he says, and that their kids benefit both socially and academically from living in a multicultural environment.

“The students also take a shining to my kids,” he says, especially the ones from China. “They don’t have younger siblings,” he explains, “as they come from a country with a one-child law.”

MCI: from High Tops to Toe Shoes

Among town academies in the metro region, Maine Central Institute in Pittsfield is definitely the granddaddy in bringing tuition dollars into town. The school has been accepting boarding students since its 1866 founding, and began recruiting students internationally in the 1970s.

Through the mid-1990s, MCI’s student recruitment centered around its football and basketball teams. The school produced many NBA players, and its postgraduate program brought in serious athletes from all over the country. But in 1995, MCI switched gears, cutting its PG football program. “The market changed,” says Clint Williams, director of admissions for MCI. “We wanted to stay closer to the school’s mission of a rigorous academic program with a multicultural student body.”

Ending the PG football program (and losing 65 tuition-paying students) left room for growth. While the school started to increase its efforts in recruiting international students in 1996, they also started a new kind of program—a ballet school. Anyone who remembers MCI’s “jock school” image over the past few decades might be surprised to learn that 12 of the school’s boarding student-athletes aren’t wearing cleats or high tops; they wear toe shoes.

The founding of the Bossov Ballet Theatre at MCI sounds like a movie plot: A tenacious man named Col. Mike Wyly (now the theater’s executive director) recruited a Russian ballet star named Andrei Bossov to come to Maine, in part, to teach his daughter. Eventually, they built a world-class high school program around this gifted artistic director and choreographer at MCI. Twelve years later, both Bossov and Wyly are still at the theater; they are now joined by associate director Natalya Getman, who left touring with the Moscow Ballet to join the program.

During the school year, day students enrolled in the Bossov Ballet Theatre are also full-time MCI students. Each day is a dance sandwich, with regular classes in between. “We’re in the studio a little after 8 a.m.,” says Cheyenne Richardson, a student from Texas. “My next class is math. Your school life and your dance life are two totally different lives that you have to blend together.”

“After-school schedules can be hard to balance,” says Abbie Rasmussen, from Utah. MCI’s ballet students, most of whom started dancing before kindergarten, usually practice three to four hours a day, including Saturdays. When they get close to show time, they can practice up to six hours a day—all of this on top of their regular ballet and high school classes.

“It is the only program of its kind in the country, says Clint Williams. “Traditional academic excellence offered in the same place as preprofessional ballet is nonexistent elsewhere,” he says. “The goal is to send these dance students to a professional company after graduation. But if not, they have a diploma from a challenging college preparatory school under their arms.”

“New York City has a lot of great dance schools, but you can’t always find the academic component to go with the dancing,” says Claire Kerr, a student from Winthrop. “I think it’s nice that here you can get a regular high school education and dance. You can be college bound and also follow your creative passions.” While her first choice is to be accepted into a dance company when she graduates, Kerr would like to go to college and study journalism if her dance career doesn’t take off.

The Bossov Ballet Theatre also offers an after-school program for students from other area schools, as well as a five-week summer program, which attracts students from all over the country. Many of them turn into full-time students at MCI. In addition to boarding students, 10 out-of-state families have uprooted themselves and moved to Pittsfield so their daughters could study at the Bossov Ballet Theatre and MCI.

One of the ironies of that move to the central Maine town: Their child will get to study with students from about a dozen countries. Close to 100 of MCI’s approximately 500 students are international. “If I had gone to Winthrop High School, I would never have met people from all over the country and all over the world,” says Kerr. “My roommate last year was from Ukraine and we’re really close. It’s amazing to make these connections in high school.”

Washington Academy’s Lure of the Coast

By now, it’s a familiar theme: Maine’s Washington County had been hit hard by a stalled economy and declining school-age population. Faced with the potential loss of teachers and programs, Washington Academy, a school in East Machias founded in 1791 with a stellar reputation, did not see cutting people or programs as an option. Instead, the board of trustees decided to start recruiting students from overseas, and in 2001 the school welcomed seven international students.

Today, Washington Academy’s 99 international students, in a total population of 360, are not just a source of financial stability—their presence is a great recruiting tool for regional students, many of whom are from sending towns with a choice of high schools. “Our local and statewide enrollment has increased by 60 students, due, in part, from interest in studying in a culturally diverse educational community,” says head of school Judson McBrine.

Derrick Porter, a student from Cutler, explains the attraction. “We get to talk to these international students every day and learn all about their culture,” he says. “They keep us from being ignorant about the rest of the world.”

The learning goes both ways. “The international students share their culture with us but it’s also fun to bring them over to your house to show them our culture,” says student Will Manchester from Whiting. “I had a Bermudian over to my house and cooked him some deer meat. It was cool.”

McBrine says the presence of international students has changed the entire community. “I know personally I look at things differently than I did in the past,” he says. “Now when I hear of something happening overseas I wonder how it is impacting the families of our students and graduates in that country.”

On the flip side, many local students take the opportunity to visit their international student friends during the summer months. “My daughter is a WA student, and she spent part of the summer in Korea,” says Kim Gardner, Washington Academy’s admissions director. “She had an experience of a lifetime. She has a second family now in South Korea.” In recent years, Washington Academy students have traveled home with international students to Croatia, Germany, Korea, Mexico, Spain, and Venezuela, and a group of Washington Academy students from Maine spent two weeks in a Chinese immersion program in Taiwan.

When Washington Academy first began recruiting students, one of the biggest hurdles was communicating to prospects how far Maine was from Washington, DC. Eight years of experience, refined marketing materials and a new website, plus word of mouth from students, families, and educational consultants, have made their brand crystal clear.

“We’ve realized we need to sell our rural coastal location,” Gardner says. “Instead of something we apologize for, it’s become our headliner.” Gardner finds that students are very interested in Washington Academy’s location-specific offerings like coastal ecology and boatbuilding. She also finds young environmentalists everywhere. “Students are very interested in our diesel-powered school buses,” she says. “They like how ‘green’ we are at WA.”

Each fall during orientation, the school treats new boarding students to a taste of rural coastal life, including a trip aboard a lobster boat. “Many of these students have lived all of their lives in the city,” Gardner says. “We like to give them as many outdoor experiences as possible before school begins. By the time they graduate, they often become unofficial ambassadors for the state of Maine.”

Many of Washington Academy’s international students like it so much here, in fact, that they stay for college. “We are seeing students going to Washington County Community College for technical training, the University of Maine, and Husson University,” McBrine says. “In fact, two recent student government presidents at Husson have been international students who graduated from WA.”