Needing Students, Maine School Hunts in China

Faced with dropping enrollment and revenue, the high school in this remote Maine town has fixed on an unlikely source of salvation: Chinese teenagers.

Never mind that Millinocket is an hour’s drive from the nearest mall or movie theater, or that it gets an average 93 inches of snow a year. Kenneth Smith, the schools superintendent, is so certain that Chinese students will eventually arrive by the dozen–paying $27,000 a year in tuition, room and board–that he is scouting vacant properties to convert to dormitories.

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{snip} Millinocket {snip} is virtually all-white, though it has hosted traditional exchange students who come for a year without paying tuition.

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“We’re used to Stearns High School being a small hometown type of thing,” he said. “The fact that suddenly we might have up to hundreds of kids from China might change that–in a good way, but we’re also kind of scared to lose our town.”