Although we live only a 30-45 minute ferry ride (five to seven miles as the crow flies) or a one hour drive away from Seattle, this is a small town with a definite blue-collar demographic. There are a few people around here who consider Seattle an overnight trip and more than a few who rarely find a reason to venture beyond this area. Puget Sound seems to be a psychological barrier to Seattle as much as it is a physical (and expensive and inconvenient) barrier. Just a 10-minute ferry ride away, where Chloe's school is, is a whole other world because people living on a rural island a mere 15-minute ferry ride away from a major metropolitan city have to leave their island paradise if they want to buy a pair of shoes. For them, riding a ferry away from their homes is an intrinsic part of their lives. And, many of the people who live there chose to live there (isn't that the case with any island community?), where a lot of the people who live here do so by default.
So Chloe and her brother and their other commuting friends (many who commute from Seattle to the island) have grown up living an interesting dichotomous life, which is only one reason why we made them commute by ferry and bus to school. At home, their friends from their old schools live very different lives than they live with their friends from their island school. I wanted them in a smaller school, but mostly I wanted the concept of venturing beyond their immediate surroundings to be a part of their lives that they didn't think twice about.
If Chloe goes to a movie with her friends, it's likely to be in downtown Seattle. We have movie theaters and department stores close to home, so kids here don't need to venture to the big city, and many of their parents would forbid it: the big city scares them because they don't know it because their parents never had a compelling reason to venture beyond this area. My parents came from Seattle so we were lucky to be spared that provincial attitude.
Which is all a long-winded way of saying that it worked. I don't know if, had Chloe gone to our home-district school, she would have wanted to be an exchange student. I don't know if the high school counselor here would have told the upcoming high school class about that possibility and, if so, I don't know if Chloe would have been interested. I do know, based on the experience of a former Rotary exchange student to France from our home high school, that Chloe would not be getting the credit hours she needs to graduate on time - it's much harder to be flexible in the largest three-year high school in the state. That alone is enough to scare many kids and parents away from the opportunity.
Myriad reasons that are impossible to parse led Chloe to the decision that she wanted to be an exchange student. The result is that now not only does she not think twice about taking a ferry away from her home to go to school or go shopping or see a movie, but she realizes that the rest of the world is only a plane ride away. It's not much more difficult to go to college out of the country as it is to go out of state, which literally opens a world of options. I was going to joke that she can thank me later, but just having the attitude that the world is open is thanks enough.
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