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WEEK of APRIL 19, 2004
@BFS! archives

UK Comes to BFS

by Jeffrey Stanley

Our country’s longstanding “special relationship” with Great Britain was redefined in the BFS community last week when ten high school students and their chaperones from the Ackworth School in Yorkshire, England visited as part of a new exchange program. Ackworth is currently on a three-week Easter holiday. The students, ranging in age from 14 to 18, are from the 9th and 11th grades. No 10th and 12th graders could attend because they are busy studying for upcoming national exams. The visitors stayed with various host families, and each Ackworth student was assigned a BFS Upper School student to host them during the school day.

The Ackworth students were Alice Hefford, Ruth Grimoldby, Louise Pashley, Guy Ibbotson, Ben Sutton, Lizzie McKinnell, Sam Aldridge, Zoe Gage, Francesca Hope and Jennifer Dawson.

The Upper School students who hosted them during the school day were Emily Martin, Nishanthy Anthonypillai, Alexei Cree, Arnav Shah, Daniel Nicolas, Naomi Edmondson, Joshua Shelto, Barbara von Salis, Amanda Chapin, and Valdine Henrius. Host homes included the Carlucci-Vereline, Oler-Epstein, Orbach-Holzka, Gruss-Rosen, Warnke-Pittman, Berge-Barr, Barber, Gentile, Schaetzel-Barber, Chapin, Scherzer, and Jouanneau-Fertig families.

Thanks to much advance planning from Upper School Head Terry Ward and 9th and 10th grade dean Roxanne Zazzaro, the visitors were kept busy both in and out of school with sightseeing trips and other activities. On a chilly Monday afternoon, the students tagged along with science teacher Janet Villas’s 11th grade oceanography class for their weekly water sampling off Battery Park in lower Manhattan. “We’re doing physical and chemical testing. We’ve been comparing two places in the East River, on the Manhattan side and the Brooklyn side,” explained Villas to the class before they headed for the subway. The Ackworth visitors assisted Villas and her class in retrieving a bucketful of the frigid water, then the class promptly headed to Starbucks to warm up.

Chaperone and Ackworth's dyslexia tutor Florence Parkinson, along with her husband Frank, stayed with the Fertig-Jouanneau family. Parkinson explained the history of Ackworth, founded in 1779, as she strolled through Harlem on a walking tour led by Upper School English chair Sidney Bridges. “It was for ‘Friends not in affluence,’ and we had girls and boys, which at the time was unusual. Ackworth was the first Friends school in the UK. Today there are seven.” The school was established because Quakers were not allowed to attend English schools and universities, “because they were Church of England. Church and state are linked.” Waxing philosophical, she pointed out that Ackworth’s founders “were cruel Quakers. They used to beat the children. It was like a prison you were put in if you were naughty. Obviously, the Quakers were creatures of their time just as we are as well.”

Twenty years ago the Parkinsons participated in an exchange program with Morristown High School in New Jersey. Parkinson recounted that her students and the children of her Morristown hosts are still friends. “I hope it’s the same in 20 years time” with the BFS kids, she said.

Bridges concluded the Harlem tour with a hearty lunch at Sylvia’s restaurant where the Ackworth crew enjoyed collard greens, smothered chicken, and other soul food delights for the first time.

Students joined their BFS host families for after school activities as well. Ackworth student Zoe Gage stayed with the Carlucci-Vereline family. “I saw Stomp and Little Shop of Horrors,” she says. She found New York City to be “amazing. It’s great."

Alice Hefford, hosted by the Warnke-Pittman family, has spent a lot of time in London visiting relatives and is accustomed to underground travel, but said the New York subway system is better organized in terms of knowing how and where to make transfers.

Chaperone Tim Fulford works at Ackworth. “I’m what we call the director of studies. I produce the timetables or schedules as you call it. I deal with the curriculum.” Comparing Ackworth to BFS, he said the two are “completely different.” He observed the marked differences between his rural students and our urban kids. “I think the pupils are different. Our school is in the middle of farm land.” However, the faculty and students are similar in the ways they interact with each other. “Respectful but informal.” He added that he and the students are “bowled over” by BFS’ food and the cafeteria staff. “They do an amazing job, we want to kidnap them!”

Fulford is staying with the Scherzer family. “They are just amazing,” said Fulford. He even took to walking the children, Nona and Max, to school every day and was thrilled to become a real member of the BFS community, however briefly. “I said I’d never come to America. I was completely wrong. I should have come years ago. It’s big, it’s bustling. There’s just so much to see.” His favorite experience was “walking across the Brooklyn Bridge in the dark.”

Terry Ward explained the importance of the exchange program. “I think it's a way to reach out to another Friends School and to fashion a partnership with a school from another country. We can find out so many interesting things about how others do education, what their views are on a whole variety of matters. It's also a privilege to show off New York City to kids from Britain. New York City has so much to see and do, it would be a real shame to limit their experience to our classrooms.”

Finding BFS host families took much effort from Ward and Zazzaro, when they might have simply put the visitors up in a nearby hotel or youth hostel, but they would have considered that a travesty. “A key part of any school is the community that defines it, which includes our parents and our families' homes,” said Ward. So, it's a chance to broaden and deepen the Ackworth kids' experience that much more, and that is what we're looking forward to at Ackworth. I should say also that the success of this is dependent on the generosity of the host families, and they have been and are most generous.”

Zazzaro also stressed the importance of having the students experience a taste of BFS students’ home life in addition to New York’s cultural offerings. “The goals are to get students and faculty of both schools to ‘live’ the similarities and differences of Quaker schools, to experience and learn about the cultural histories of New York City and Yorkshire. The walking tours hit historical areas—the Brooklyn Bridge, Ground Zero, St. Paul’s Chapel, Carnegie Hall, Central Park, Times Square, Brooklyn Heights. With these treks came a history of the city.”

A group of BFS students will be leaving for Ackworth on June 26 for a 10-day stay.

“I think all communities should spread their wings and build friendships,” Fulford said about the exchange program. “It’s really cool. It’s great.”

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