February 12, 2025
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Lee Academy pursuing Chinese satellite school

LEE – Lee Academy officials hope to have two satellite high schools in China within the next two years – one of which they plan to open in January 2009, Headmaster Bruce Lindberg said Tuesday.

Part of those plans include a recently signed conceptual agreement to create a foreign language school in Wuhan, a city of 9.1 million people about 500 miles north of Hong Kong and 600 miles south of Beijing, that would, if all goes well, open this September.

That language school will be part of a satellite high school that will help make Lee Academy the first U.S. institution to open an American high school on the Chinese mainland. It will also help the private secondary school generate more income and maintain its student population against declining enrollments pinching almost all northern Maine schools.

The conceptual agreement was signed with Wuhan officials and a Glendale, Calif.,-based foreign language school that will help teach English to the Chinese students to prepare them to study at a Wuhan Lee Academy or in Lee next January.

“The first step is getting the students proficient in English,” Lindberg said Tuesday. “Hopefully they will become proficient in English and we will start our programming in January.”

Lindberg will return to Wuhan on June 11 to sign an agreement finalizing the Lee Academy program in China. The program will be folded within Wuhan High School Number 4 – Chinese secondary schools are numbered instead of named – much the way that universities have schools within them.

As many as 1,000 Chinese students would be taught an American curriculum at the Wuhan Lee Academy, and six Wuhan students would be tuition students at Lee in September, said Lindberg, who returned from a weeklong trip to China at the end of March.

During the June trip, Lee Academy officials also will meet with Beijing officials to pursue the creation of another Lee Academy. The timeline for that endeavor “is still unclear.”

“It’s probably two years out because there’s no facility for it in Beijing,” Lindberg said. “They would have to build the facility. The group in Beijing has already contracted for 100 acres of land near the Great Wall [of China] but things have to move before they will be ready.”

The foreign schools will help funnel more Chinese exchange students into Lee. About 75 Lee students already come from other countries, including 10 from China. The foreign students as well as others from around the U.S. live in dorms on campus in Lee, a community of 800 about 15 miles east of Lincoln.

Eventually, the school’s Lee staff and student population of about 275 could increase by a third and generate as much as $500,000 in additional revenue annually for the school.

A private academy founded in 1845, Lee has contracts with local school boards to educate students from SAD 30, which serves Lee, Springfield, Webster and Winn. The school also serves students from Greenbush, Kingman, Topsfield, Vanceboro and the Passamaquoddy Tribe of Maine. Tuition, room and board is approximately $26,000 per year for seven-day boarding students.

School officials, who have identified the Far East as a significant growth area in the international education market, had been in talks with officials in Vietnam, but it doesn’t look as if anything will happen there, Lindberg said.

“They just became very caught up in protocol and government relations and China seems to be more agreeable to this whole concept,” Lindberg said.

nsambides@bangordailynews.net

794-8215


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