When Ken Smith took over as superintendent of the Millinocket School Department in July 2010, he inherited a tough challenge: Revenue was falling as enrollment continued to shrink. The high school had fewer than 200 students last year, compared to 700 in the 1970s. The school department budget had a $1.1 million hole that needed to be filled, otherwise Smith would be faced with spending his first year on the job cutting education programs and laying off staff.
Rather than accept the story line that Millinocket is a dying mill town with no hope of the schools regaining enrollment, Smith decided to change the narrative. While Millinocket wasn’t attracting new students from domestic sources, Smith noticed the rising number of international students who wanted to travel to the United States for an American high school experience. With the support of the local school board, he launched a program to recruit international students for Stearns High School. The decision was novel enough to warrant an article in the New York Times that October.
“People have to stop complaining and come up with ways to change their revenue sources,” Smith says. “This seems like a natural to me. To bring in international students and learn from them, as well as driving some income.”
Smith traveled to China last October. The trip is beginning to pay off. This fall, six tuition-paying Chinese students will attend Stearns High, adding $144,000 to the school department’s budget. It’s a far cry from the 60 students and $1.4 million boost Smith expected to deliver to the school system, but it’s a start.
Millinocket is a pioneer in what some say is a trend in Maine and across the country. Private schools in Maine, like Lee Academy in Lee and Thornton Academy in Saco, have boarded international students as a revenue generator for a handful of years now, but only recently public schools have begun pursuing the same strategy. “It’s a whole different ball game right now,” says Suzanne Fox, a consultant who has helped several schools in Maine, including Millinocket’s, develop international programs. “Just with public schools entering the fray it’s huge. It’s so huge.”
So are the variables. Millinocket expected 60 Chinese students based on assurances from a recruiter in China who failed to deliver, according to a report from The Associated Press. The situation wasn’t helped by a Chinese publication that characterized American public schools as mediocre and Stearns, in particular, as “run-of-the-mill.”
Despite the slow start, there is enough interest in attracting foreign stduents to public schools to prod legislative changes. International students can attend U.S. private high schools for four years, but public high schools for only a year, a federal law that Smith is trying to change. Sen. Susan Collins has agreed to co-sponsor a bill to allow public schools to enroll international students for four years. “There is a level of interest,” Smith says. “People didn’t realize that this law existed, that private schools had the decided advantage.”
These new students, the majority from wealthy Asian families, boost school revenue and bring diversity to Maine’s schools, but they also bring pockets full of spending money to spread throughout the local business community, where they’ll shop for snacks, clothes or buy lift tickets for a winter weekend at a nearby ski resort.
“You bring in 100 new people to a market area and they’re spending money at stores, buying clothes, Big Gulps at 7-11, there’s going to be an economic impact,” says Wade Merritt, vice president of the Maine International Trade Center, which in April led a trade mission to South Korea that included representatives from Lee Academy and John Bapst in Bangor. “There’s also extended family. They come to visit [the students], hotel nights, rental cars, using airports and taxis. Getting more people here is the short-term win.”
But Fox is more interested in the long-term win that can be realized from the exposure Maine receives from foreign students and their families.
She cites an encounter she had at a Chinese language roundtable she started in Portland for people like her — she has lived and traveled extensively in China — to practice their language skills. About a year ago, a Chinese man who spoke no English showed up, having heard about the meetings from another Chinese person. As it turned out, this man’s son was attending Gould Academy in Bethel. Looking to stay close to his son, he had decided to purchase a condo in Portland. He is now a regular member of the meetings, happy to speak his native tongue in such a foreign place as Maine.
One condo sale may not make a splash in the southern Maine real estate market, but Fox sees it as anecdotal evidence of the potential long-term economic development implications these international students and their visiting parents could have on Maine. ”The connections that can happen with tourism and the business community…” Fox trails off. “I just think there’s more interesting things that can happen. They do have money and they don’t know what Maine has to offer. So what I’m trying to do is brand Maine in China.”
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