Story:
School District No. 46 (SD46) is looking at increasing its support of international students, with four different options being considered.
The options presented to the public at the Jan. 10 school board meeting include staying with the same approach, but engaging more companies to find students, hiring a part-time person to support an international student program, partnering with two other school districts to foot the bill of a full-time support person or using a building like the Sechelt Learning Centre to run an international school where local students could also enroll.
Currently SD46 has only a handful of international students enrolled in high school and no specific program to support them.
"Currently, really what we do is enroll international students without an international program. They are able to come to our schools, they pay tuition and they participate in classes with their Canadian counterparts," said superintendent of schools Patrick Bocking.
Those international students pay $10,000 a year to attend SD46, which is more than it costs to educate them. That makes expanding the program attractive from a financial standpoint.
"It could potentially generate funds for sure," added Bocking. "When there are enough students enrolled in it, it does generate funds for us, and the amount they pay is worth more than it actually costs to educate them. So yes, we can make money on it that we can then obviously return to programs and classes and all of that. So there's certainly an advantage to it."
The other advantage is the enrichment of education when other cultures are present in the classroom.
"Of course, it's a real mutual benefit for our own students to be able to learn from these international students," he said. "It's always a really enriching thing to be able to talk to a student from Brazil or Germany or China or wherever. That's an important part of having an international student program."
No matter what option the school board decides to go with, the goal is to increase international student enrollment on the Coast to anywhere from 55 to 100 students per year.
Bocking notes there is much discussion still to be had before any changes are made.
"The next step would be to get some indication from the board on what direction they want to take. It's gone to the education committee now, so it will be discussed there as to what things we can do educationally," Bocking said.
Following that, the options will have to go to budget discussions as well.
"Then through into the fall we'd put some more concrete actions in place - develop a program, if that's the way the board wants to go, and then move forward," Bocking said. "We've got a lot of possibilities here. It could be really exciting. It could be really neat for our students and certainly for the international students."
