Welcome Mat Is Not Out for Students From Abroad

The San Fernando Valley is home to plenty of well-traveled, upscale families.

So Phil Clapick figured he would have no problem recruiting school-year hosts for foreign high school students when he volunteered two years ago to help the American Scandinavian Student Exchange program.

“I was wrong,” said Clapick, 43, of Woodland Hills. “It’s actually stunned me. I’ve tried everything you can think of to find people who will take a student. People just aren’t interested.”

Clapick wrote last year to pastors of 20 Lutheran churches in the Valley soliciting help in finding host families for Swedish, Finnish and Danish teen-agers. He says not one replied.

‘People Aren’t Interested’

“This year I went to all the high schools in the West Valley, and that didn’t work,” Clapick said. “I printed up a brochure at my own expense and distributed it in my condominium complex, and there wasn’t one call. I go up cold to strangers in restaurants or at my racquetball club, and it’s the same. People aren’t interested.”

In Thousand Oaks, Margoth Bielat, another Scandinavian exchange group volunteer, set out this spring to find homes for 20 youngsters. So far, she has lined up four.

“The more affluent the area, the harder it seems it is to place students,” Bielat said. “I put an announcement in the local paper last year and got 26 phone calls in response. This year I got seven from the same announcement.”

The reaction is the same across the Valley, say representatives of exchange-student programs who are struggling this month to line up host families for the 1985-86 school year.

Most-Sought Destination

Southern California is the destination most sought by exchange students, who come to the United States from 67 countries after signing up with 37 private or nonprofit organizations. But Los Angeles--and the San Fernando Valley in particular--has turned into the land of the cold shoulder.

“The Valley is potentially a very good place for exchange students, but quite frankly I wouldn’t want to have to rely on it,” said Charles Andromidas, a regional director of one such group, Youth for Understanding.

Andromidas’ organization will bring 3,700 foreign high school students to the United States this summer. Only 200 will be assigned to Southern California, about 25 to the Valley.

The poor local placement rate is due to changing family life styles, Southern California’s increasingly cosmopolitan makeup and restrictive rules for granting diplomas to 12th-grade exchange students attending Los Angeles city high schools, those in the field say.

“People in the Valley and in Southern California in general move more and change jobs and marriages more than people in other parts of the country,” Andromidas said. “They don’t perceive exchange students as being all that interesting or unusual like they may have in the past.”

The Valley has been picked for a major host-family recruitment effort next year by AFS International/Intercultural Programs. The 71-year-old New York-based group is this country’s largest and oldest student exchange organization. It was formerly called American Field Service.

“We’ve targeted the Valley’s ‘Big Chill’ generation, as we call it,” said Lynne Sanborne, director of public information for AFS, referring to the Yuppies from the movie “Big Chill.” “We know there are a number of people in the Valley who went abroad through AFS themselves in the ‘60s and are now grown up and conservative and in a position to be a host family themselves.”

3 End Up in Valley

Sanborne’s group has placed 5,175 foreign students in U.S. homes this year. About 265 were sent to California. Only three ended up in the Valley.

Virginia Hughes, a Granada Hills resident who became an AFS representative after hosting an Australian girl in 1967, said she would place more many more in the Valley “if I could just find the host families.”

“I hear all sorts of excuses why people can’t do it,” Hughes said. “The wives work; their house is too small. But the main thing, I feel, is that people don’t think they’d qualify.

“But it does not have to be a well-to-do home. The exchange she placed in the Conejo Valley. She said she was able to line up replacement homes for each.

But Woodland Hills’ Clapick, who is a night-working West Coast newswriter for NBC’s “Today Show” and a bachelor, said he ended up taking in a 16-year-old Swedish boy three months ago. Friction had developed between the youngster and his host family in Northridge, and a replacement family could not be immediately found, he said. It turned out the two of them get along well, according to Clapick.

Seek ‘Comfortable’ Homes

Host recruiters said they look for “comfortable” homes whose families have a sense of humor. They weed out parents who may be anticipating that foreign students can be used as baby-sitters. Single-parent families are acceptable, but Clapick said he rules out men who “ask me to send them an 18-year-old Swedish blonde who does massage.”

Successful student-to-family matchups are rewarding all the way around, host recruiters agree.

“Living here has helped me grow up,” said Patrik Inerup, an 18-year-old Swede who is staying with the Dennis Schult family of Northridge Hills. “I’ve learned to adjust to not having my mom and dad behind me. I’d like to come back to America. I’ve gotten a pretty good impression of America so far.”

Schult, who signed up after spotting an exchange student announcement in a neighborhood newspaper, said Inerup has blended in nicely with his own family.

“He’s a very up person, very positive. We’re an active family, and he’s taken up my hobby of restoring old cars. It’s worked out great,” said Schult, an insurance agent who has three children.

‘I go up cold to strangers in restaurants or at my racquetball club, and it’s the same. People aren’t interested.’

--PHIL CLAPICK