Exchange and CHS Foreign Travel

In February of 1982, Nichols School received its first group of French Exchange students from the Lycée Saint-Joseph in Le Havre, a port city on the Normandy coast of France. A few weeks later the group of Nichols students who had hosted the French students traveled to Le Havre to spend three weeks in France. The exchange program was the vision of Dr. John Sessions, a Nichols' French teacher, and Dixy Buchard, an English teacher at St.-Joseph, as a way to take foreign language teaching outside the classroom. The program was to be a school-to-school and family-to-family exchange in which students would attend classes in their host school as well as travel to places of local interest. Dr. Ssssions was given the go-ahead by then Headmaster Peter Cobb as an experiment.

The experiment was long ago declared a success. Twenty-seven years later neither Nichols nor St.-Joseph could imagine a school year without an exchange program. Nichols has since added an exchange program with a school in Spain and one in Costa Rica. The Lycée St.-Joseph now boasts nine exchange programs with countries all around the world.

The structure of the French Exchange Program is unchanged since its inception. After twenty-seven years, the program has included younger brothers and sisters of former participants, and a participant on the first exchange in 1982 is now a Faculty member at the Lycée St.-Joseph. This year the French Exchange Program added a major new dimension in a public/private partnership.

Shortly after the Buffalo Board of Education last spring lifted its foreign travel ban imposed in the fall of 2001, Dr. William Kresse, Principal of City Honors School, expressed a desire for City Honors' International Baccalaureate students to have the opportunity to travel abroad to experience a foreign culture and to practice language skills acquired in IB course work. Jeffrey Crane, the Nichols Exchange Director for 2008-2009 invited his colleague and wife Eileen Crane from City Honors' foreign language department to select a group of her French students to participate. Eight City Honors students joined twelve Nichols students in this year's program. The French students and their chaperones, Hubert and Laurence Dejean de la Batie, husband-and-wife history and English teachers respectively, from St.-Joseph arrived in Buffalo on February 13. Housed with Nichols and City Honors students for three weeks, the students attended classes, spent days at each of the two schools, toured downtown Buffalo where they were received at City Hall by Deputy Mayor Donna Brown, visited the Albright-Knox, Niagara Falls and Toronto and attended a UB Bulls basketball game, among other activities.

On March 27, Mr. and Mrs. Crane and their group of twenty students flew to Paris and, after a two-hour bus ride, joined their French counterparts in Le Havre. The American group attended classes at the Lycée St.-Joseph, visited the Bayeux tapestry, Omaha Beach and the American Cemetery, the medieval city of Rouen, a goat-cheese farm and spent three days in Paris. They enjoyed a reception in the Town Hall of Sainte Adresse, a suburb of Le Havre, where they were hosted by Monsieur Dejean de la Batie who, in addition to his teaching duties at St.-Joseph, serves as one of Ste Adresse's Deputy Mayors. The group returned to Buffalo on April 17.