"The Charlottesville school division will not send students to Italy this summer.

The city School Board held off Thursday evening on approving a proposed exchange program with the Tuscan city of Poggio a Caiano, one of Charlottesville’s three sister cities.

“Tabling this in essence means that [the exchange] will not happen this summer,” School Board Chairman Ned Michie said. “But it is very worthy of future discussion.”

It has not been determined exactly when that discussion will take place, but Michie said it would be in the “near future.”

School Board member Kathleen Galvin said the board was not yet in a position to give the program a go-ahead.

“I don’t feel we can make this an action item tonight,” she said. “It would be more prudent to deliberate on it during a work session, so we can flesh out all issues and concerns.”

School Board member Juandiego Wade was of the same frame of mind.

“We’ll have more time to talk about issues like passports and how to choose kids,” he said.

Superintendent Rosa Atkins was not at Thursday’s meeting so that she could be with her ailing mother.

Michie said that Atkins told him that Italian officials have been inquiring recently about whether Charlottesville would be sending students this summer, as planning and preparations would need to get under way soon.

The Italians can now hold off on those plans and preparation until at least 2009.

In November, Atkins and then-School Board Chairman Alvin Edwards visited Poggio a Caiano along with then-Charlottesville Mayor David Brown. In early December, Atkins brought the board a detailed proposal for the exchange program.

That proposal called for 25 middle-school students, with six to eight adult chaperones, to travel to Italy this July and live together for 12 days in an elementary school temporarily converted into a dormitory.

In August, 15 to 20 high-school student, with five to six adult chaperones, would have traveled to Poggio a Caiano for 12 days and lived with host families.

Charlottesville would have hosted Italian students in the summer of 2009.

The cost of sending up to 45 students and 14 chaperones to Italy this summer was estimated at $65,000, the cost of airfare.

The city’s cost to host Italian students the following summer was estimated at $104,000, including accommodations and the visitors’ other expenses in the U.S.

A private fundraising campaign, similar to the one used to send the Charlottesville High School orchestra to London last spring, was being considered." (Barney Breen-Portnoy, The Daily Progress, February 22, 2008)