Kim Monteith has helped bring exchange students to Nova Scotia for 23 years. And over the last decade, she says her job has become a whole lot harder.
Monteith is Atlantic Region Coordinator for non-profit cultural exchange group Nacel Canada. (My son participated in a Nacel exchange earlier this year, and my family is currently hosting a Grade 10 student from Taiwan.)
She says “the availability of placements for our students is being gradually minimized over the years.”
That's because so many slots in schools are being taken by the wildly successful Nova Scotia International Student Program (NSISP). Launched in 1997 jointly by the province's school boards, it brings students from 28 countries to Nova Scotia for programs ranging from a few weeks to a whole school year.
Both Nacel and the NSISP place students with host families, offer ESL camps when students arrive, and try to provide an authentic Nova Scotia experience. The main differences are philosophical: the NSISP brings international students here, while Nacel offers a trade—exchange programs—with some students coming into the province and others going abroad.
While foreign students used to be a rarity in Nova Scotia secondary schools, this year there are about 970 here with the NSISP and 23 with Nacel. Those numbers have made Nova Scotia second only to BC in terms of the percentage of international students in the school system, according to NSISP executive director Paul Millman. (He says 2.1 percent of students in BC schools are international; the figure for Nova Scotia is 0.7 percent, which puts us well ahead of Ontario.)
The NSISP's goal in aggressively pursuing international students was to “create internationalization in our schools,” says Millman. In the 1990s, global history or global geography became a requirement for high school graduation. Millman, who has a social studies background, says he remembers thinking, “This is crazy. We're telling kids they need to learn about the world, but in most schools they have very little contact with other cultures.”
The NSISP targets many of the same countries as Nacel (including Brazil, Germany, and Japan) and promises that there will be no more than five students from any one country in a school. So, if the NSISP has placed five German students in a high school, the school can't accept anyone Nacel might bring in.
“I'm worried about the future of cultural exchanges,” Monteith says. “It's getting more and more difficult to find schools to accept the students, and to find the host families. The school and the school boards get a percentage of the tuition fees that NSISP students pay, so it's a real carrot for the schools to accept them.”
Millman says the NSISP brings in about $10 million a year. But he rejects the notion that the program is all about money.
“What I love about our program is that it's educationally based. We didn't have a mandate to generate revenue—we had a mandate to internationalize our schools and broaden our educational base. Most of our kids are in rural areas. If our goal was just to make money we'd send all the kids to Halifax, Truro and Sydney.”
Millman has no qualms about squeezing out groups like Monteith's, which he says are “a net drain on our public coffers.” Most school boards are willing to accept three incoming Nacel students for every Nova Scotian student who goes abroad with the program. Millman says that costs the province.
“The Department of Education is paying for three kids where one used to sit. If three exchange students come in and one goes out, it's costing the department more than if nobody came in.”
Monteith says Nacel was founded after WWII as a way to “promote global understanding and world peace” -- and she's clearly a believer in the ideals of the program. But those goals don't mean money isn't involved. Many exchange students' families cough up amounts comparable to what NSISP students pay to come here – typically, somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000.
Given the numbers, it's clear this is not a fight that Nacel is going to win. But does it matter?
What do you think? Does it make a difference whether students come to Nova Scotia through the NSISP or as part of a cultural exchange? Is either group all about the money? Or do they just each have a different focus?
