NFA international enrollment climbs but school needs more housing options

Norwich ― Back home in her school near Beijing, China, Delancey Ye asked her teacher for advice on finding a high school to attend in the United States.Norwich Free Academy quickly became a top choice, Ye said."NFA is a good school," said the 17-year-old Ye, a junior in her second year at NFA. "My teacher told me about NFA, because NFA is a big school. Everyone knows about it."In her small town in Germany, Lil Leopold weighed foreign exchange student options shown by different student agencies and became enamored by the class offerings and other amenities at NFA."NFA provided me with a lot of possibilities of what I want to study," Leopold, a 16-year-old junior said, "and NFA has requirements my school requires. And NFA has stuff that I really wanted to do. That is basically why I wanted to go to NFA."NFA leaders want to hear comments like this from the growing number of international tuition students coming to the school. Ye is happy to repeat the message over and over as a volunteer ambassador at NFA open house and admissions events.Faced with projections for steadily declining high school-aged populations in eastern Connecticut, NFA has increased its effort to draw tuition-paying students from outside its traditional partner towns and beyond U.S. borders. Locally, NFA advertises throughout the region that students from any town can consider NFA and it has opened a recruitment office.Internationally, NFA works with about a dozen student placement agencies to lure students from around the world to its college-like campus.The effort started before the COVID-19 pandemic, and in 2020, NFA had 70 tuition-paying students, 51 of them from foreign countries. International numbers shrank fast during the pandemic, when there were just seven students from China attending remotely, NFA spokesman Michael O'Farrell said.This year, the number of tuition students at NFA has surpassed pre-COVID numbers for the first time, with 83 tuition students. They include 51 international students from 13 different countries, led by 16 from China and 15 from Canada. The initial goal for this year was 63 students, O'Farrell said.The students pay different tuition rates, depending on the agencies, ranging from $16,000 to $26,000, Head of School Nathan Quesnel said, plus housing costs. Host families receive $11,000 to $12,000 per year, and hockey team members pay additional hockey fees.This year, tuition income totals $1.1 million, a critical source of operating revenue, Quesnel said. NFA partner district towns pay $15,181 per student this year, with Norwich paying $14,981, a $200 per student discount as host city.A residential dorm at NFA?Quesnel said NFA has reached capacity based on the number of available host families in the region. NFA has 36 host family arrangements and needs more."We had to turn away 10 students this year," Quesnel said, because NFA could not find housing for them.Quesnel used the international recruitment situation as a main talking point at both the Nov. 19 Board of Trustees meeting and at the Nov. 7 corporators' annual meeting."Come January, we have to have a big conversation about this," Quesnel told the trustees. "I do not believe we can maintain 2,100 students by doing what we are now."He showed sobering enrollment trends already in motion at NFA. The current senior class has 582 students; junior class, 539; sophomore class 504 and ninth grade 475 students.NFA will continue recruiting locally to boost those numbers, while increasing its presence in the international student market. In recent months, Quesnel, NFA Director of Admissions Kelby Chappelle and Director of Finance Richard Freeman visited high schools with residential halls in Connecticut and elsewhere in New England. Such a facility would require logistics NFA has never managed before, including 24-hour supervision and the need for a residential life program with activities and routines beyond school and homework."We're actively trying to understand what that means," Quesnel said. "We traveled to schools in New England."NFA officials have learned, for example, that in general, students from Canada and Europe prefer being housed with a host family in the region, while Asian students might feel more comfortable in a dorm setting, perhaps for cultural reasons.One student agency NFA contracts with runs its own residential dorm in Derby ― south of Ansonia in western Connecticut ― and buses 11 Chinese students to NFA each day.Three years ago, NFA gambled that creating the elite, non-varsity, Norwich Hockey Club, would bring in tuition-paying Canadian students eager to play in the United States and boost their college prospects. The hockey club now has 29 players and can field two teams.Next year, the Norwich Hockey Club will have a girls' team as well.Canadian players mostly live with local hockey families, O'Farrell said, who are OK with driving students to 4 a.m. hockey practice at the Norwich ice rink.The Norwich Hockey Club is not a varsity team in the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference, which governs high school varsity sports. The CIAC prohibits athletic recruiting, so NFA's international tuition students are ineligible to play varsity sports. They can play junior varsity, and O'Farrell said many do play sports, including golf, tennis, cheerleading and soccer.At home in PrestonDonna Osborne's daughter, Alexandra Tabilas graduated last year from NFA and now is a freshman at Tufts University, thanks to the prestigious Sidney Frank Scholarship at NFA. Osborne of Preston had seen the many lawn signs NFA has planted throughout the region seeking host families for international students.She answered the call, opening her home to Ye and to Leopold, who is in her first year at NFA. Ye, in her second year at NFA, lived last year at a home in Lisbon.The two students said they have adjusted quickly to living in the woods in Preston with Osborne's pitbull dog and now six cats. There were five cats until Leopold last week said she wanted a kitten. Osborne brought orange and white kitten, Carrots, home from the Norwich pound.Like Ye, Leopold said she loves NFA and all it offers. She is the volunteer student manager for the Norwich Hockey Club and subscribes to the games' live-streaming service. There's no play-by-play announcer, but she and Ye often are glued to the giant TV in the living room watching games and trying to figure out on their own who scored, who is in the penalty box or who took the face-off.Osborne said her sport is soccer, and her favorite team is Manchester United. Sometimes Ye watches those games with her.This week, they will enjoy a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, with Tabilas coming home for the holiday.Osborne described their plan for Thursday ― Leopold's first Thanksgiving experience ― including watching the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on TV."Pajamas, coffee, nothing to do until we eat," Osborne said.Next week, they will hunt and cut down a Christmas tree at Hartikka Tree Farm in Voluntown, another first experience for Leopold.The two students have their own bedrooms at Osborne's Benjamin Road home, one of them in Tabilas' former bedroom. Asked if she would prefer keeping her room or moving into a new room being framed and constructed in the basement, Tabilas chose the basement, Osborne said."I'm definitely going to do it longer," Osborne said of being a host family for NFA international students. "It's definitely something to do. These guys are all right."c.bessette@theday.com