The typical extent of Parker’s foreign exchange program is a year-long immersion of a foreign senior and a bi-annual exchange with the ISC Barvaux school in Belgium.  This year there’s more: Cloé Raynal, a seventeen-year-old from Pau in the South of France, visited Parker for two weeks in October and November.

Each day Raynal was assigned a different student to shadow.  These hosts, all students enrolled in some level of French, were of various ages, genders, classes, and activities. In this way, according to Upper School french teacher Cynthia Marker, Raynal was able to get a better sense for life at Parker as a whole.  

Raynal was able to meet new people, she said, and have various classroom experiences.  “This school is very different from mine,” Raynal said. “The classes have a small number of people, and we always have conversations.”

In France Raynal attends Saint Jean-Perse high school in Pau.  It takes her over an hour to travel to and from school, so she, along with about 80 other students, boards at school during the school week.  Boarders, according to Raynal, have little free time–around half an hour between the end of the school day at 6:30 pm and when she has to be back at the boarders’ residence.

American life as a student was a very different experience, according to Raynal.  Since Parker school days end much earlier than those at Saint Jean-Perse, she had an abundance of free time to relax and explore the city.

While Parker hosted Raynal for the duration of each school day, the school was not directly involved in all aspects of Raynal’s visit to the United States.  Rather than staying with a Parker host family, as the Belgians and yearly exchange students do, Raynal stayed with a family friend.