THOUSAND OAKS : Students to Travel, Study in Spain
In just six weeks, high school senior Dan Toscano will leave urbanized Thousand Oaks for a tiny Spanish village to experience what he has only read about in books.
“I have all these images of what a small town is like,” said Toscano, 18. “It will be eye-opening, to say the least.”
A dozen Thousand Oaks High School students will stay with host families in Spain and attend school with the same Spanish students who visited them last August and September. This is the first time that this dual-exchange program, called Spanish Heritage School-to-School Homestay Program, has come to Thousand Oaks High School.
The purpose of the program is to show the local students, ages 14 to 18, that the Spanish language and culture is more than something in a textbook, said Spanish teacher Karin Levine, who will accompany the students.
“We want to give them exposure to something they’ve never seen before,” Levine said. “They’ll be learning to live the language.”
Toscano, who hosted Spanish student Ferran Izquierdo last year, said Izquierdo’s three-week visit greatly improved his foreign language skills.
“I was dreaming and thinking in Spanish,” Toscano, a fourth-year Spanish student. “Even a month later, I was using Spanish words.”
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