Exchanging Lessons : Rolling Hills Estates Program Offers Students, Families Understanding of Other Countries, While Creating Lasting Friendships Worldwide

Everybody knew they’d love Disneyland, Magic Mountain and Universal Studios.

They also enjoyed shopping malls, the Getty Museum, the Huntington Library and California teen-agers.

But after three weeks of living with 20 American families on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, 20 Italian teen-agers agreed that they didn’t like American food, whether it was called Chinese, Japanese, Mexican or even Italian. In returning home, they were looking forward to some real Italian fare.

The students, who recently went back to Latina, Italy, southeast of Rome, were part of an exchange program established four years ago at Rolling Hills High School in Rolling Hills Estates. It allows a look at Yankee living, while affording American students the same sort of opportunity to see how others live--whether they be Japanese, English or Italian.

Exchange Process

The Italians were completing the second half of an exchange process that began last spring, when 20 American students (13 from Rolling Hills High and 7 from Palos Verdes High School) traveled to Latina, where for three weeks they each lived with an Italian teen-age student and his or her family.

In October, the Italian students were welcomed by the families of the American students, and for three weeks the schedules and living conditions of 20 Palos Verdes families became more crowded.

It was a small price to pay, said one member of a host family, for lasting friendships and a better understanding of the similarities among people worldwide.

“You really understand people better when you live with them,” said Howard Lawrence, principal of Rolling Hills High and a member of the National Assn. of Secondary School Principals, which sponsors School Partnerships, International.

The organization, based in Reston, Va., has been pairing American high school students with students in France, West Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan and the United Kingdom for 16 years, with the idea of fostering a better understanding of other cultures and, ultimately, a better understanding of American culture, said Rosa Aronson, a program manager who is responsible for exchanges with France and the United Kingdom.

Aronson said about 500 high schools nationwide participate in exchange programs with an equal number of foreign high schools.

Lawrence became acquainted with the exchange program in the 1970s, but it wasn’t until 1984 that he organized it at Rolling Hills High. That year, he took eight students to Japan. He accompanied 10 students to Japan the following year, and another 10 the year after that. In 1987, the Rolling Hills High program sent eight students to England. This year, 20 students went to Italy and eight students went to England.

Next year, Rolling Hills High students will travel to France, Italy and England. Lawrence, who shares chaperoning responsibilities with several teachers on the school’s staff, hopes that the school will be selected to exchange with a high school in Leningrad or Moscow in 1989 or 1990.

While the American students are abroad they follow the schedule of the host student. If the American visits while the host school is on vacation, there is more time for sightseeing, but if the host student is in school, the guest student spends more time in a foreign classroom.

Students are prepared for the exchange with a crash course in the host country’s language and an historical and cultural overview. Though language barriers present problems, they are not unsurmountable, Lawrence said.

He said two Rolling Hills High students who traveled to Japan in 1984 now speak fluent Japanese.

Lawrence said participation in the exchange program is open to any student with at least a C average and a good discipline record and who can afford the average $1,500 fee that covers air fare, insurance, administrative fees, ground transportation and chaperon air fares. Students receive course credit for participating.

But despite the close scrutiny given each student before he or she is packed off to a foreign country to live with another family, problems can occur. This year, an Italian student was sent home in connection with an alleged theft. Lawrence, who declined to comment on the specifics of the matter, said only that “this is the first time that we had what we would consider to be a major problem. Most of the problems are problems of adjustment. We make it very clear right from the beginning . . . that should there be any problem . . . that the most severe action taken is to send the student back.”

Success of Exchange

Lawrence said the disciplinary action was negligible when compared to the success of the exchange as a whole. “It was fantastic,” he said, adding that only a week and a half after the Italians’ departure, some students had received long-distance phone calls from their friends.

Mark Hughes, the 19-year-old son of Rancho Palos Verdes City Councilman Mel Hughes, was a Rolling Hills High senior when he traveled to Italy as part of the exchange last spring. He stayed 3 1/2 weeks with the family of Federico Dell’Aglio, 17.

“His family was very nice to me. His friends were really great,” Hughes said. “I thought he’d be bored here. Here, there’s nothing to do at night.”

But Dell’Aglio, who was assigned to the Hughes’ big downstairs bedroom complete with a VCR-equipped television, said nights playing basketball and “broom ball” were far from boring. (Broom ball, he explained, is like playing hockey with brooms and no ice skates. It’s played--with permission--late at night on the ice rink at The Shops at Palos Verdes, formerly the Courtyard mall.)

Time-Consuming Task

Because Hughes is now a freshman at Marymount Palos Verdes College, Dell’Aglio attended class at Rolling Hills and Palos Verdes High Schools without his host. He didn’t find it inconvenient, because he knew the other Italian students and had 19 other American friends.

Seven Palos Verdes High School students were included in the Italian trip for the first time this year. Lawrence, who welcomes the involvement of any high schools in the area, said that handling exchanges can be time-consuming, which often discourages principals from participating.

For Lawrence, the exchanges “add appreciably to my intellectual growth and prevents burnout. The world has shrunk. We can no longer be provincial. We have to be cosmopolitan.”

For Hughes, the trip to Italy marked the third exchange in which he participated. As a sophomore, he went to Japan, then as a junior he visited England.

“We haven’t traveled,” said Doris Hughes, his mother, “just our kids.”

The Hughes have been host to four students since Mark began his travels. A second Japanese student found a welcome mat at the Hughes’ home when more students visited Palos Verdes than originally planned.

“This boy almost wouldn’t leave,” Mel Hughes recalled. “We practically had to carry him on the plane.”

As hosts, the families are generally responsible for all the guest student’s food expenses while he or she is visiting, but most families also pick up entertainment as well.

“The neat thing about this exchange is these kids are a part of our family forever,” Doris Hughes said, adding that she would volunteer again to have a visitor, even though Mark is no longer a high school student.

“It actually is a lot of fun,” Mel Hughes said. “We’ve enjoyed it as much as Mark. Each child is a little different. And we’ve seen more of L.A. and its points of interest in our three years of hosting students than we had in our lives.”

Mel Hughes said he saw a big difference in Mark after he returned from his first trip to Japan.

“He came back much more self-reliant. He had to get along in another country, another culture, without English subtitles.”

Four days before departing Los Angeles for Italy, the Italian students gathered around a conference table at Rolling Hills High School. Would they like to come back to the United States?

“We want. We hope. We must,” said Marco Buono, 17.