An estimated 2,000 international students are stuck on U.S. boarding school campuses, even as classes have been canceled by the coronavirus pandemic.
Between the endless hours Yifan Jin spent listening to Taylor Swift and watching science fiction movies as a little girl in Wenzhou, China, and the sparkle in her eyes during a trip to the U.S. when she was 14, her mother knew she would adjust well to living and going to school in America.
About a month ago, as one state governor after another ordered school closures to quell the spread of the virus, boarding school leaders across the country overnight became travel agents and diplomats, making flight arrangements and consulting with one foreign embassy after another to broker safe passage home for more than 15,000 foreign high school students living on boarding school campuses in the U.S. and Canada.
2,000 students stuck on campusesThe Association of Boarding Schools, a research and information hub for an estimated 95% of college preparatory boarding schools in the U.S. and Canada, conducted a survey last month of how schools in their membership were dealing with COVID-19 school closures for their collective enrollment of 100,000 students.
Safety has been a primary concern among boarding school leaders, who now remain in charge of students like Jin indefinitely. None of the children at the Wisconsin school have been outside the premises while it has been closed. For high-school-age international students who remain in dorms in the U.S., the school closures and uncertainty tied to the pandemic can unnerve even the most resilient child, said Chris Thurber, a psychologist at the 1,000-student Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. At Phillips Exeter, each of the 800 boarders returned home.
“A teenager who is able to go home can ask a lot of those ‘what if’ questions they would have in the midst of a pandemic,” Montgomery said. “But students who don’t go home don’t get that chance, so it’s important for them to get it out in some way.” Members are also reporting that their endowments are down, and fundraisers for initiatives like capital improvements have all been suspended. So the absence of international students from boarding school campuses will not only harm school diversity and the culture of student life, but it also could have drastic financial consequences.
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