GCISD welcomes visitors from Scotland
GCISD welcomed visitors from West Lothian, Scotland as part of the City of Grapevine Sister City program. The group arrived in Grapevine on Tuesday, September 13, and will be touring sites and attending events throughout the community until September 19. Their tour within GCISD included Cannon Elementary: A GCISD STEM School where they interacted with first and fifth graders as students worked on various engineering projects, teaching the visitors about the STEM program. Their tour of the district concluded at the Technology Education & Career Center where they observed students in career-guided environments, such as culinary arts, health sciences and robotics engineering.
“The biggest takeaway is that it makes the world a classroom and gives students opportunities to see and experience first-hand the differences and similarities of these communities,” said Patrick Antinone, GCISD director of fine arts, explaining the value and support this program gives to the GCISD Portrait of a Graduate. GCISD dance and art students further developed their global citizenship this past summer when they traveled to Scotland and visited the West Lothian community. Antinone continued to explain that this exchange program gave students the opportunity to travel abroad, to a country they expected to be completely different from their own, and discover, after interacting with fellow students, they are both very similar.
The Grapevine and West Lothian communities have exchanged travel experiences with one another since 2007.