W
hen Springwood School in Lanett, Alabama
enrolled its first international student in 1999,
it was just the beginning of a growing global
population that would attend the private school.
That student was Celeste Troche, who went on to Au-
burn University, where she was named the 2001 South-
eastern Conference Player of the Year for women’s golf.
She was later a member of the LPGA in 2003.
Ann Hixon, director of the International Student Pro-
gram, said Celeste’s sister then came to Springwood and
a few more students trickled into the program. However,
it wasn’t until 2012 that the school decided it deliberately
wanted to start an international student program.
Hixon said the school started a homestay program,
which allows students from overseas to attend Spring-
wood while staying with a host family in Lanett.
“We had a great result with that,” Hixon said, adding
that the international school had 16 students during the
2016-2017 school year.
But, due to the number of students and the lack of avail-
able homestay parents, Springwood knew it needed to
provide another way to keep growing the program.
“Because of everything they brought to the school by
way of diversification and education for our students, as
well as bringing in new enrollments for the school, we
decided that we would expand the program and renovate
an existing residence,” Hixon said.
The building chosen was the school’s former child de-
velopment center. It sits about a five-minute walk with a
visible path to the main campus. Hixon said the building
was run as a development center for young children for
several years, but it wasn’t turning into a feeder program
for the school like administrators imagined.
After the program was shut down, the building was
empty until Springwood started to host kindergarten and
primary school classes there.
Due to the success of international recruiting, it made
sense to turn that building into a residential structure and
make it a home for the international program.
The first year of the program was 2017, and then-Head-
master Rick Johnson and his wife were the house parents.
Hixon said Springwood quickly found out that recruiting
Restaurant Style Dining at Vernon Woods
42 • LAGRANGE LIVING | FEB. 2020/MARCH 2020