The town of Albertville, France is known for hosting the 1992 Winter Olympics, but students at Franklin Community High School will soon know it for many different reasons when students from the town pay a visit to Franklin schools later this year.
During the trip, slated for spring, 15 to 20 students from Jeanne d’Arc Middle and High School will travel more than 4,400 miles to Franklin Community Schools, where they’ll meet and interact with students in Judi Carlstrand’s high school French class.
“I think this is the best practice, for students to have a chance to practice with native speakers,” Carlstrand said. “It doesn’t happen so often in Indiana. To speak French you have to go to Canada.”
Students from France will spend their 10-day stay with host families. Twice as many families as needed have already volunteered to host students, Carlstrand said.
During their stay, students from Albertville will attend classes with Franklin Community High School students, and the two groups will act out aspects of French and Hoosier connections at the Johnson County Museum of History, such as the French fur trade and traveling along the St. Joseph River. Both groups of students will also have a basketball clinic with the Franklin High School boys’ basketball team, followed by a pizza party, she said.
A trip to Indianapolis is also in the works, including stops at the Eiteljorg Museum, the Children’s Museum and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, according to school documents.
The visit, which is scheduled for April 16 to 25 materialized due to a partnership between Franklin High School and West Lafayette Jr. and Sr. High School. A teacher at Jeanne d’Arc, Alain Wallart, asked former students for a possible connection that would bring his students to the United States, Carlstrand said.
When a woman who Wallart used to teach mentioned her son’s French teacher, Steve Olhaut in West Lafayette, that connection was made. Carlstrand serves on the board of the Indiana Foreign Language Teachers Association with Olhaut and expressed interest in the visit. While some French students visit Franklin, an equal number of students will visit Olhaut’s French class in West Lafayette, Carlstrand said.
Carlstrand is a firm believer in travel as a way to bolster learning. As a Spanish teacher, she has taken students to Spain nine times. In June, she’ll take students to France for the first time, where they’ll see the D-Day beaches in Normandy, the chateaux in Paris, the palace of Versailles and Mont St. Michel, a monastery at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean, she said.
Although the trips Carlstrand has taken her students on have mostly involved visiting cultural sites, a trip to see those same students in Albertville is a possibility in the future, she said.
“I think there’s a potential for a trip to the Alps,” Carlstrand said. “We would potentially have a good time with this exchange if we keep it up.”
