COVER STORY
25 Jahre/25 Years: Prep’s German Exchange By Jim DeAngelo, ´85
For over 25 years, Prep’s German Exchange program has given students the opportunity to experience not just a language but a culture, not just an academic subject but a way of life. As Prep’s oldest student exchange program looks ahead to the next 25 years, Prep’s principal – a participant in the very first exchange in 1985 – reflects on that first experience with Clara-FeyGymnasium, and what’s next. This year, Prep celebrates the silver anniversary of its German Exchange program with Clara-Fey-Gymnasium. Since its inception in 1985, some 200 Prep students have had the opportunity to participate. The model is simple and repeats itself every other year: Prep students host a group of German students and teachers in their homes for a couple of weeks in the spring, with a return visit to Germany in the summer. This spring, Prep welcomed the 14th group of Clara-Fey students taking part in the 2011 exchange between our two schools. In the early months of 1985, first-year history and German teacher, Bill Donahue, floated the idea of a student exchange with the school administration. After receiving the initial go-ahead, Donahue quickly went about finding an appropriate partner school with which to begin an exchange. As luck would have it, Clara-Fey-Gymnasium, a
in Schleiden and the surrounding towns with names like Gemünd, Blankenheim, Hellenthal and Oberreifferscheid. “For some of the Prep kids, this was their first encounter with rural culture,” recalls Bill Donohue. “Some lived with families on farms, getting up at 4:45 a.m. to do the chores before coming to school. It was new for me too: I had never seen this side of Germany before.” As plans for the first German exchange were being finalized, I was a second semester senior, who, admittedly, was a little skeptical that anyone – much less a group of Europeans – would want to spend time in Jersey City. As a student in Donahue’s political science class, every so often I would overhear him speaking with students from
For some of the Prep kids, this was their first encounter with rural culture. college-prep high school in what was then West Germany, was also looking to initiate an exchange. He remembers, “The big part was getting the Prep to approve a student exchange with a girls’ school— remember, that is the way the Clara-Fey was then thought of, basically as a girls’ school that had just started accepting some boys. I frankly didn’t think it was very likely, but was delighted to hear that [thenpresident] Joe Parkes, S.J., ‘62 had approved. This was a lifetime ago, when a mix-gender exchange of this length – with homestays – was his German classes, practicing some key phrases in German for the not something to be taken for granted.” arrival of our guests. As for my own foreign language experience At first glance, one could think that the differences between both of to that point – suffice it to say that I was a “recovering” student of French who found the prospect of ever speaking a foreign language our schools would prove just too great to engender the long-term fluently a lost cause given my misexperiences in sophomore and institutional relationship that has developed over the years. As junior years. Donahue notes, Clara-Fey was essentially an all-girls’ school about half the size of Prep with a very small number of boys in the upper As the date of our guests’ arrival drew near, it was difficult not to grades. Also, the school was located in the far western reaches share in the enthusiasm and pride that Donahue exuded whenever of the country, the Eifel region, where, it seemed, the number of he spoke of the importance of such an exchange. In the mid-1980s, cows grazing on the hills far exceeded the number of inhabitants 10
SPRING 2011 www.spprep.org PREP Magazine
