Foreign exchange host encounters policy issue with school district

Thursday, October 25, 2007

Dr. Mark Comensky has been hosting exchange students since the early 1990s. Now he says the Nevada R-5 School district is making that more difficult for him. Comensky currently has two students he is hosting and they are enrolled in the Sheldon schools because of the changes in district policy.

Comensky said that by changing the policy, the district has “erected barriers to hosting a student that make it impossible to get them in.”

In addition to Comensky, Kathy Lenon, another host parent, also had concerns about the policy changes.

Both acknowledged that the changes were fairly recently enacted and occurred about the same time as Dave Adams left as the high school principal. Superintendent Craig Noah said he wasn’t sure about when the policy change was put in place but believed it was around the year 2000.

Noah said that the policy was put in place because of concerns about the district’s ability to serve more than one exchange student per year.

“The consensus was that the teachers and staff would have a difficult time serving all the foreign exchange students,” Noah said. “Mrs. Rainey was in charge when the policy changed to allow only one exchange student per year.”

At one point there were several foreign exchange students at Nevada High School and that prompted the change in policy.

“The heads of the departments met and discussed the situation and felt that by limiting it to one foreign exchange student per year the staff would be better able to serve the needs of those that do come,” Noah said.

Noah said that Comensky met with the committee responsible for maintaining the policy and that it was the committee’s decision to keep the policy the same.

“He spoke with me and met with the committee,” Noah said. “They talked about the policy and all of our staff were in agreement with the policy as it is. We thought having him review the policy with everyone would help, but that didn’t work out.”

Comensky said that the decision to be made at the meeting he attended seemed to be a foregone conclusion and that the staff seemed to have made up their minds before the meeting began.

Comensky said he felt especially frustrated because he had intervened several times on behalf of the district and defended it but that he wasn’t sure he would continue to do so in the future.

“There are several times when I’ve intervened when someone wanted to sue the district because they didn’t feel their kids were getting the education they needed,” Comensky said. “I explained to them, maybe it’s a communication thing, let’s work together and we got it resolved. But like I told Mr. Noah, now I’ve experienced that myself. You know, there was no working with these people at that committee meeting. I mean nothing. It was horrible, horrible. We came to that point and Kathy and I both spoke about that and not one teacher, not one that was there said anything positive about it.”

Comensky said he felt the meeting actually made things worse.

“I felt disrespected it was so rude,” Comensky said.

“Yes, I felt there was no point in going on,” Lenon said. “When I went in I thought they really wanted input, that’s what he (Thompsen) said. After that my feeling was they were just going to come up with a policy that would make it as restrictive as possible, and that’s what they did.”

Noah said that the district would like to be able to accommodate every patron but sometimes is unable to do so.

“We don’t want to upset anyone but there are times when we can’t do what a patron requests,” Noah said.

The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education foreign exchange policies allow districts to make their individual policies as lenient or restrictive as they wish.

“State law allows districts to decide for themselves what their policies should be,” John Weber, DESE School Improvement department, said. “Some districts don’t accept any foreign exchange students and some accept quite a few.”

Comensky said that another thing that upset him was that while the students he is hosting attend Sheldon schools they are not counted toward the average daily attendance, which would allow the Sheldon district to receive state funds from the foundation formula.

“I want to know why they won’t release the kids so that Sheldon can get the money, I pay good taxes to Nevada,” Comensky said. “Sheldon isn’t charging them any tuition, which I feel bad about since they aren’t getting any of my taxes. I don’t think that’s right. Nevada can’t get the money since the kids aren’t attending there so why won’t they release them?”

Noah said that there is a mechanism for doing that but the district wouldn’t want to set a precedent. For one thing, he said that it was very likely that Sheldon students might wish to come to Nevada if that option were available.

“If we did that it would set a precedent and open a Pandora’s box,” Noah said. “Our concern is that once we did that others would come forward wanting the same.”

Comensky also questions why the school policy dictates that a host parent has to have a high school age child in the home in order to place an exchange student in the school.

“What about parents whose children are already through high school?” Comensky said. “Do parents lose the ability to handle a high school age child because theirs is no longer in the home?”

Noah said that having a child the same age as the exchange student helped integrate the student into school activities.

“I think the consensus is that having a student of the same age in the home helps exchange students fit in,” Noah said.

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