Glen Ridge High School has been playing host to a contingent of seventh- and eighth-grade Chinese students visiting the United States as part of a cultural program. The activity is sponsored by the International Partnership of Education, Research and Cooperation, a non-profit headquartered in Columbus, Ohio. It works with school districts in Columbus and Los Angeles.
“Its aim is to develop sister-school partnerships between the the United States, China and Taiwan,” Mack Bell, the IPERC student program coordinator, said at the high school recently. “In American schools, we organize short-term international trips. Glen Ridge High School has established these to China and Taiwan. The school has been involved with the program for 10 years. IPERC provides scholarships to Mandarin language students in this school.”
Shihong Zhang, the current GRHS Chinese department chairperson, initiated the exchange program for the borough school.
Bell said the sister school of GRHS is Shanghai Nanhui High School, but the students currently visiting are from Yucai Academy, located in Zhejiang Province, in its largest city and capital, Hangzhou. It is an eastern coastal city south of Shanghai.
There will be about 350 visiting Chinese students here and they are staying in two hotels in Parsippany. None are staying overnight in the borough, as they have in previous years.
“In the past, there was a homestay element,” Bell said. “But logistically, this time, it was not practical because of the number of students. The last time for this summer camp was pre-COVID.”
The students are passing through GRHS in eight groups, staying for five days before continuing on.
“The high school is one leg on the trip before tours of New York City, Philadelphia and Boston,” Bell said.
The students will visit Harvard and MIT. While in Glen Ridge, they took classes in English as a Second Language; Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics; visual arts; mathematics; and sports, all conducted in English. Four GRHS teachers are the instructors with other teachers from local schools.
Yucai Academy instructors are chaperones. Sixteen Glen Ridge middle and high school students are acting as student ambassadors/mentors as are another 90 students from local schools.
The first two groups of Chinese students arrived Monday, July 22, and departed following their presentation of a talent show Friday, July 26. Among the guests at the show were school Superintendent Kyle Arlington and Board of Education President Elizabeth Ginsberg. The event featured student talent and a video of classroom activities during the preceding week. Among the guests at the show were Qilun Qin, a representative from the Chinese Consulate, in New York City, and Jing Han, the president of IPERC who originated the student program.
Of course, there were speakers and among them, Zhang and Arlington.
Zhang told an audience of 150 students and guests about her first experience taking GRHS students to China.
“At the beginning, I was very nervous,” she said. “I wondered if we had the capacity to do this. But the parents of Glen Ridge opened their arms. Ten years ago, who knew what would happen?”
Zhang said she was so nervous that she did not want to travel to China before the scheduled trip to look over facilities. In her place, then-School Superintendent Dirk Phillips went and returned with a thumbs up. But Zhang said she was still nervous about the adventure.
“When I got out of the plane in China, I threw up,” she said. “But my students said, ‘Don’t worry; we’ll do very well.’ What else did I need other than their support.”
Arlington said 21st-century global skills can be built in many ways and that he appreciated IPERC’s emphasis on developing leadership skills.
The talent show was a blend of old and new, of Eastern and Western cultures. One cryptic performance had female dancers holding bowls and spoons on their heads while a male youngster performed a rap-like song in Chinese. He received a big hand and all the children had their pictures taken with Arlington presenting their certificates.
Speaking with one of the GRHS ambassadors, eighth-grader James Colello told this newspaper the American students taught their Chinese counterparts about the traditional shape of a table in this country. It is rectangular, with the father at the head. In China, Colello learned, the traditional table shape is round, with the father and eldest son sitting across from each other.
The summer IPERC program will end on Friday, Aug. 9.
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