Maggie Paneva is one of those rare teenage European exchange students whose year abroad is counting as her school year in her home country.
Indeed, Maggie is both a senior at Windom Area High School this year and a senior at her high school in the city of Alcalá de Henares, which is a short distance from Spain’s capital city of Madrid.
“I’ll graduate from Windom and I’ll graduate from my high school in Spain this year,” she says proudly.
One quickly notices a couple of things about the petite 16-year-old brunette Spaniard, who is spending the school year with the Todd and Heather Janssen family in Windom. For starters, she’s as bubbly and eager to talk about her life in Spain as she is about her temporary home away from home in Minnesota. Secondly, she speaks and understands fluent English. In fact, there’s only a hint of a Spanish accent.
“In Spain, they have public bilingual schools,” she explains. “I was raised learning biology and history in English. I’ve never had history in Spanish. I have had history of Spain, but in English.”
For much more on Maggie, see the story on the Education page in the Oct. 20 issue of the Cottonwood County Citizen on newsstands tomorrow.
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