JACKSON, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – For over 30 years, a Jackson Public Schools exchange program has been welcoming German students to the U.S. and sending local students abroad, giving middle and high schoolers a chance to explore the world and practice a second language.

“It’s been a very rewarding experience,” said Wendy Adams, a German teacher at Jackson High School and program co-coordinator. “When kids look back on their high school career, it’s something very special.”

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The exchange is part of the German American Partnership Program, which helps connect American and German schools from across the two countries. In the 1980s, GAPP started a series of biannual exchanges between JHS and Lothar-Meyer-Gymnasium, a German high school for college-bound students. Adams calls the partnership “a perfect match.”

American students pack their bags in June and head to Varel, a small town in northern Germany about two hours outside Hamburg, close to the North Sea. Students join host family students in classes at Lothar-Meyer-Gymnasium and travel around the country, spending about three weeks in total overseas.

One field trip takes students to Berlin, where they’ll spend a full day exploring the city. Another takes them to island beaches, where they’ll take a mud walk at low tide. In Bremerhaven, they’ll tour the German Emigration Center, where they’re given passports that allow them to follow stories of German émigrés through reconstructed vignettes.

“It’s a really great experience because we get to live and stay with families, so [the students] get to really be in a German family and experience the life and culture as if they had lived there,” Adams said.

Later, during the fall semester, a cohort of German students visit the U.S. to stay with the families of students who participated in the program earlier that year. Their main field trip will take them to Chicago, where they’ll watch their reflections in the Bean, scale the Hancock Building, and shop on the Magnificent Mile. This year, students also visited Meckley’s Flavor Fruit Farm and Jackson City Hall.

Adams said the program is so popular with Lothar-Meyer-Gymnasium students that a lottery is held to determine who gets to go.
“American life, for the kids that come here — it’s just not anything they’ve expected,” Adams said. “We’re very busy people, but extremely friendly, and I think they feel like people welcome them with open arms.”

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Friendships between exchange students often last long beyond the program’s end, Adams said, recalling one American student — now an adult — who regularly travels to Germany to visit his friends. And now, Adams is seeing students who were once in the program enroll their children, giving them an experience they’ve treasured since their own time abroad.

This year, students received nearly $20,000 in scholarships from the John George Foundation, a Jackson-based student loan fund. Adams said this allowed the program to take more students this year, with up to 25 participants from each country.

“It’s a chance for them to really see the world and open their eyes to the possibility [that] you don’t have to live your life here,” Adams said. “You can go wherever you want and do whatever you want.”