The U.S. State Department is looking for ways to better protect the 30,000 teenagers who come to America annually as foreign exchange students.
In a notice yesterday in the Federal Register, the department asked the public to contribute ideas on how it could better vet, select, and monitor the thousands of host families that participate in the half-century-old federal program.
The goal: to prevent a repeat of a scandal this past spring in Scranton, where as many as a dozen foreign students were found to be either malnourished or living in deplorable conditions, including one home littered with dog feces and another later condemned by the city.
Current regulations allow the approximately 100 U.S. companies that bring students here to independently evaluate the financial resources, moral character, and suitability of potential hosts.
A lack of definitive "industry standards," however, is "putting at risk the health, safety and welfare of this most vulnerable group of exchange visitors," the department wrote in its announcement of a 30-day comment period.
Sen. Bob Casey (D., Pa.) said this week that new regulations were urgently needed to close loopholes that allow exchange companies to virtually regulate themselves, thus jeopardizing the safety of the students, ages 15 to 18.
As both a Scranton native and a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which oversees the State Department, Casey has closely monitored the federal response to the problems in Scranton. In May, he raised his concerns about lax oversight in a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.
"The current oversight system is reactive, not proactive, and permits the ongoing abuse of foreign students without any effective intervention until the situation is dire," he wrote.
In an interview Tuesday, Casey said "the department has to do a better job. The families have a right to expect that, and our taxpayers have a right to expect it. . . . Department regulations need to be strengthened so these neglect-and-abuse issues don't have to wait eight months to be addressed," as happened in Scranton.
Among many issues, the department is seeking public input on how to:
Evaluate hosts' character references and conduct criminal background checks.
Monitor host homes for sanitary conditions.
Ensure that families have adequate financial resources to care for foreign students.
The department also is considering requiring a host to have, at a minimum, one other school-age child in the home because "problematic placements" often occur in childless homes.
In a request to the Office of Management and Budget earlier this year, the department asked permission to create its own management-audit system to monitor the exchange companies. Currently, the auditing falls to an exchange industry association, which critics say is a patent conflict of interest.
That association is the Council on Standards for International Educational Travel, an Alexandria, Va., nonprofit. Its executive director, John Hishmeh, said he welcomed yesterday's action as "an opportunity for the youth exchange community and the State Department to work together."
The Scranton exchange students had to be moved to the care of Lackawanna County's Department of Human Services last spring after they complained, over a period of months, of living in unacceptable conditions.
A Colombian boy, barred from eating food in the host's refrigerator, was undernourished and dehydrated. A Nigerian girl lived in a house strewed with dog feces. One student was housed with a person convicted of a drug-related felony, according to Lackawanna County District Attorney Anthony Jarbola.
In July, a county grand jury issued a five-count indictment for child neglect against the former area coordinator for the California company that brought the students to America.
In June, the State Department imposed sanctions that allowed the company, Aspect Foundation, to continue operating but with a 15 percent reduction in the number of students it could enroll for the 2009-2010 academic year.
The federal foreign exchange program, created during the Eisenhower administration, is a "public diplomacy" initiative designed to promote America's image abroad.
"Although complaints about inappropriate placement or actual mistreatment . . . represent the exception rather than the rule, there have been a sufficient number of incidents of such severity" that the regulations need to be honed, the department said in its announcement.
Advocates for exchange students say that there are problems nationwide, but that the Scranton cases have been a catalyst.
"It was very powerful for the public to learn . . . that the State Department was allowing its sponsors to self-investigate," said Danielle Grijalva of the Committee for Safety of Foreign Exchange Students, a nonprofit watchdog group she founded in San Diego. "That has been a concern of ours for years, but it was uncovered in Pennsylvania."
Casey said he would keep pushing if it turned out that any new regulations were not strong enough to bring needed changes.
"If we think the steps they have taken are inadequate," he said, "we will impose legislation."
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