The culture wars roiling countries around the world reached Tregaron this fall, when the administration ended this year’s eighth-grade Spanish language exchange with a school in Peru. Administrators decided to sever ties with Colegio Santa Margarita, a Catholic school in Lima, when the school in Peru objected to placing its students in same-sex or single-parent households during the exchange.

Each year, eighth-grade students host “correspondents” from France and Peru for a 10-day stay in Washington. WIS eighth-graders then travel to those countries and stay at the homes of their correspondents. The cultural exchange is a decades-long feature of the eighth-grade experience. 

Last March, middle school principal Randy Althaus traveled to Peru to meet with Santa Margarita’s head of school Betsabé Márques de Gálmez, and to discuss extending the two schools’ relationship. In the meeting, Althaus mentioned that WIS had a variety of types of families, which Gálmez said would not be a problem. 

Althaus returned to Washington expecting that the language exchange with Santa Margarita would continue as usual in the 2019-20 school year. But, over the summer, Gálmez met with her school’s board of trustees, and they decided it was contrary to the Catholic school’s core values to place students in families that were not comprised of a mother and a father.

“That, of course, precluded many of our same-sex families, but also potentially divorced families or families with single parents,” Althaus said. 

“We recognize that we are going to places where people might have some different perspectives and we value that as part of our language trip,” Althaus said. “We encourage a diversity of perspectives and that includes religious perspectives or more conservative perspectives that generally our community is not associated with.”

However, the exclusion of some WIS families was a sticking point. After consulting with Head of School Suzanna Jemsby and Associate Head of School Natasha Bhalla, Althaus decided to cancel this year’s Spanish exchange with the school in Peru. 

This year was not the first time issues with cultural compatibility arose in the eighth grade language exchange. In the past five years, WIS ended its French exchange with a school in Toulouse, as well as the Spanish program with Colegio San Agustín in Madrid. 

Althaus noted that the main reason for the end of the Madrid trip was that San Agustín could not meet their commitment of sending a certain amount of students to Washington. But, he also claimed that the school in Spain refused to place their students in “certain types of households,” which gave him a “sense of concern” about the school in Peru.

However, David Reyes, the head of the English department at Colegio San Agustín who is in charge of the exchange, denied any concerns with students being placed in same-sex or single-parent households.  

“The different conditions and particularities of each household have never been a problem for us,” Reyes wrote in an email, translated from Spanish.

Reyes agreed with Althaus that the main issue with the exchange was insufficient Spanish students signing up for the trip, to match the amount of WIS students. But, in his email to Dateline, he raised other cultural issues.

“We did notice on some occasions some ‘positive discrimination’ on the part of [WIS] with some realities I suppose have a marked sensitivity,” Reyes said. He refused to go into detail on what he meant by “positive discrimination,” which generally means the practice of favoring groups known to have been discriminated against.

Although WIS eighth-graders won’t have a homestay exchange, they will travel to Peru. WIS has partnered with EdOdyssey, a student travel company, to plan a Language and Cultural trip to Peru. Students will stay in hotels rather than the traditional homestay that has occurred in previous years.

Althaus said students and parents have been supportive of the decision to part ways with the school in Peru. He is disappointed that there will not be a homestay this year, but he felt that he could not exclude members of the WIS community from the exchange.

“It was non-negotiable for us,” Althaus said. “Inclusivity is non-negotiable for WIS.”