Fostering International Exchange: Mecklenburg County Welcomes Students from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany

The Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners fostered positive international relations and education by welcoming a group of students from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany. The students and their hosts from the South Academy of International Languages (SAIL) joined the Board at their meeting on May 6 to thank Mecklenburg County for its role in rekindling and nurturing relations between the two regions.

Mecklenburg County, USA, has a business, cultural, and educational partnership with Mecklenburg-Vorpommern—a partnership which celebrated its 30th anniversary last year. The 15 German students attend the Recknitz Campus in Laage, Germany, a town in the Rostock district of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. During their Board appearance, the students recited their homeland’s state poem.

Students recite the Pledge of Allegiance at the May 6 BOCC meeting.

The German students’ visit comes on the heels of an April 2025 exchange trip by nine SAIL students to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. South Academy of International Languages (SAIL) is a public K-8 magnet school that offers second language immersion instruction in Chinese, French, German, and Japanese. Hosted by their peers in Germany, the Charlotte-Mecklenburg students visited universities, historic sites, and the birthplace of their hometown’s namesake Queen Charlotte.

SAIL Principal Dr. David Lynn thanked the Board for its role in rekindling the exchange program between the two schools and bringing the two cultures together. It began in 2024 with a visit to Charlotte by a delegation from Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, and later a reciprocal visit to Germany by Chair Mark Jerrell, Commissioner George Dunlap, County Manager Dena R. Diorio, and Catherine Hansen, Chief Protocol Officer for the N.C. Consulor Corps.

“That rekindled a partnership between two schools that started 15 years ago as a teacher-to-teacher partnership," said Dr. Lynn. “Following a pause due to the pandemic, we were able to re-establish the partnership focusing on student exchange. Like a phoenix, our mascot as a school, we were able to rise up to something even better.”

The English-language immersion program at the Recknitz Campus in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern is modeled after the German-language immersion program at Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. The CMS students from SAIL led off the Board of County Commissioners meeting by reciting the U.S. Pledge of Allegiance in German and English.