For the past two years, Mississippi native and world traveler Chris Herring has spent several autumn weeks in Southeast Asia to recruit international students to attend U.S. high schools.
A few years ago, Herring started American Education Advantage, a company that connects international students to American host families and high schools, including Heritage Academy in Columbus. Last year, Herring arranged for three international students to stay with a host family in Starkville while they attended Heritage.
Herring runs the business from his home in Louisville. It’s a job that combines Herring’s favorite things — traveling and meeting people from different places and cultures — and which takes every ounce of his networking and salesmanship skills.
Herring has contacts all over Southeast Asia. He’s been gathering them for years, as a principle at international schools in Singapore and South Korea and as someone who has traveled all over the world. Everywhere he goes, he talks to people. Let people tell you their stories, he says. That’s how you make connections.
Those connections become important when trying to arrange for a teenager to spend a year in another country. There are all kinds of paperwork to file and details to plan, from who will pick the student up from the airport to which family in the area is able and willing to let someone else’s child stay with them for a year.
Luckily, people are willing to trust Herring partly because of the relationships he’s cultivated with schools and families, and partly because of his experience with international travel and exchange programs. In addition to teaching abroad, Herring has hosted an international student in his home for two years and designed the international program for Horizon Christian School, a private school in Oregon where he was an administrator.
Herring’s business is small but growing, from only two students two years ago to hopefully 10 this coming school year.
Andy Hsu was one of three international students who attended Heritage while staying with a host family in Starkville last year. Hsu is from Taipei, Taiwan and had never been to the U.S. before August 2014.
“Life here is wonderful,” he said.
Hsu came to Heritage from a 15-hour school day in Taipei, where classes could contain up to 45 students. In Taiwan, people devote far more time to studying, Hsu said, whereas Americans are more outgoing.
“The school here is half a day,” he said. “It’s easy.”
It wasn’t just the school day that was different. Hsu said he was struck by how friendly everyone in Mississippi was. He likes that the driving age in the U.S. is 16 and he enjoyed spending time with his host family, who accepted Hsu into the youth group they lead. That was another difference between Americans and Taiwanese, he said. Americans tend to have stronger religious faith.
Hsu does not intend to end his American education any time soon. He will spend the summer with his family in Taipei before flying back to the U.S. next fall to finish high school at Horizon Christian School in Oregon. He hopes to eventually study political science at Ohio State University or the University of Arizona.
Greg Carlyle, the headmaster of Heritage and a personal friend of Herring’s, said Hsu and the other international students who worked with Herring to get to the U.S. all contributed to the school, from doing well academically to participating in service projects and statewide academic and art competitions. Mostly, Carlyle said, their presence created an environment where the visiting students and the American students constantly exchanged cultural knowledge and learned from each other, becoming friends as a result.
“I just think it’s a win-win,” Carlyle said. “For both the students coming in and our students, as well as the community.”
Carlyle and Herring are in the process of working to bring two more students from abroad to Heritage next year. The hardest part, Herring said, has been finding host families in the Columbus area. As word of the business spreads, he is more hopeful that Columbus families will open their homes to international students.
“I feel like we’re changing a culture a little bit,” Herring said. “And that’s my dream.”
To learn more about American Education Advantage, go to aeanow.com.
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