In Maine, several private schools and academies have sizable international programs with admissions departments to lead efforts to spread the school’s reach overseas. Smaller public programs often are one-person shops, perhaps the principal or a guidance counselor, who occasionally take recruiting trips overseas.

They attend conventions where they court kids and parents and pitch their schools and home states as a great place to get an education and a taste of American culture. They also work closely with overseas agents, who work with families to find schools in the United States that meet their children’s goals and aspirations.

The pitches for coming to Maine are often very similar — clean air, the outdoors, small schools, individual attention and safe communities. This pitch is crucial for many districts, especially in rural areas, which struggle to find an adequate number of students.

Mt. Blue High School in Farmington expects to bring in its first crop of F-1 visa students to start the next school year, according to Lisa Dalrymple, director of the school’s international program and district chairwoman for world languages.

Several years ago, the district cut world language classes in its elementary schools due to budget challenges. Dalrymple pitched launching an F-1 visa program, bringing a small number of tuition-paying F-1 students to the high school in order to fund the revival of world languages in the early grades.

They’re hoping to get 10 international students next year, some F-1 tuition-paying students and some on J-1 cultural exchanges. Each F-1 student will pay up to $25,000 in tuition, plus room and board to the families that host them. That should be enough to bring Spanish, French and American sign language back to the elementary schools, Dalrymple says.

The added benefit is bringing diversity and global perspective into the school’s classrooms.

“We’re taking in students and we’re taking in culture, and now we’re maximizing what our students can learn about the rest of the world,” Dalrymple said.

Dalrymple is starting her school’s program with just $10,000 to spend. She’s had to seek grants in order to travel outside the country. She has relied on the advice of the Maine International Trade Center and U.S. Commercial Service to get things started.

Last May, the school hosted education agents from Thailand for a tour and dinner organized with the help of the U.S. Commercial Service. She has been to China once and hopes to travel to a few countries in the fall, but nothing has been ironed out.

She’s trying to take what recruitment opportunities she can locally, to keep costs down. For example, she attended the Association of International Educators conference in Boston earlier this year.

“We’re just starting, it’s very costly and timely to recruit students,” Dalrymple said.

Mt. Blue’s startup is a far cry from Thornton Academy’s program. With 155 international students and six years under its belt, it has an admissions department staffed by three, including director Mark Powers. They oversee all applications that come into the school, but also take trips overseas, visiting schools and fairs where they pitch Thornton alongside hundreds of other international boarding schools. They operate much like a college admissions office.

Powers said he is overseas three or four months out of the year on recruitment trips that last a week or two and hit multiple locations. His two colleagues also make trips.

“A lot of the time we’re traveling,” he said. “We’re in Thailand, where no one’s heard of Maine.”

Orono High School has been welcoming F-1 international students into its halls for several years. The program, like many, started with primarily Chinese students, but Orono is an example of how these recruitment efforts have since diversified.

Next year, the school expects to have up to 15 international students representing China, Finland, France, The Netherlands, South Korea and Vietnam, according to Mackenzie Hanson, the school’s international student coordinator.

Orono High School officials hope to open a dormitory to international students, in rented space that is undergoing renovations on Main Street near the school. That plan has been put on hold for a year because the space needs work, but the school is looking to partner with the University of Maine to house students in vacant space on campus. It has done so in the past.

Public school programs in Maine, however, still have much to do to compete with academies in international student recruitment. One of the leading examples of what’s possible in Maine from an expansive focus on international recruitment is Thornton Academy.

This past school year, students representing 22 countries attended Thornton. Just over half the students were from China. More than a quarter came from Vietnam and Spain, with the other quarter representing 19 other countries, the largest contributors being the Czech Republic and Ukraine.

In May, Headmaster Menard traveled to Washington, D.C., to receive the President’s “E” Award. The recognition is given to people, firms or organizations that contribute to efforts to increase U.S. exports.

In this case, the export happens to be education and cultural experience. Thornton Academy is the first school in the country that isn’t a university to receive the “E” award. It’s also the first Maine organization to win the recognition since 1983.

This accolade comes seven years after Thornton Academy opened its first dormitories, hired experienced admissions staff and started courting students from around the globe. In the program’s first year, it brought in 38 students, then 54. After opening a second dorm, the numbers swelled to more than 100.

The costs were significant — $10 million for the dorm projects alone, 38 new staff positions, opening the kitchen for three square meals a day — but so was the revenue through boosted enrollment.

“It’s a big commitment of resources and time,” Menard said. “You are parenting these children, so you need to provide the whole host of services” — academic support, nursing services, transportation, meals, supervision, emotional assistance.

“Everything you do as a parent, we had to do times 150,” the headmaster said.

Thornton Academy lists its individual student tuition and boarding room cost around $45,000. Much like colleges, Thornton and other schools with international populations have scholarship programs to help offset some costs.

The school has enough beds for 110 of those students, the rest stay with area families. For students who don’t live on campus, the boarding costs go to their host family.

Much of this revenue goes back into covering the costs associated with caring for 155 international students, but it also helps educate the entire student body, according to Menard.

The funding source also helped bring in new offerings, including new faculty, cultural organizations, and new Advanced Placement offerings, bringing the total number of AP courses to 24. It also brought a cultural diversity to the school.

This outcome is what other schools wish to emulate, both to stabilize and build their curriculum for students like Tianyu “Sam” Zhou, who graduated from Thornton in 2015 and is now heading to Syracuse University to study computer engineering. .

“Even though I did well in China, and I could get into a top university in China, I still chose to come [to the U.S.] because I [could] have more choices,” Sam said. “More things to learn. More things to see.”