Eight-year-old Ashley Hika had never met anyone from China until eight Chinese visitors walked into her third-grade classroom at Fort Crawford Elementary School in New Kensington last week.

"I think it was really cool," she said after the visitors watched teacher Barbara Grego's class learn the intricacies of the calendar.

If fledgling plans grow, they won't be the last Chinese visitors to the New Kensington-Arnold School District in Westmoreland County, a district of about 2,300 students. And there may be chances for New Kensington-Arnold students and staff to visit China or share teaching via long-distance conferencing.

The visit was intended to begin exploration of a "sister school" relationship with the Jilin City Educational Bureau in northeastern China.

"I think it's an opportunity to teach diversity to our students," said Superintendent George Batterson. "We're going to have to be able to have partnerships with countries like China that are future world leaders."

Through the region, some schools are looking at ways to give students a global reach, whether it's via letters, e-mail, teleconferencing or students and staff visiting one another.

"There are a lot of teachers looking to do more things in a remote way, connecting, really giving the idea of a global classroom and interacting with students from around the world," said Annie Prucey, education director of the World Affairs Council of Pittsburgh.

Some of the programs have been around for many years. Mt. Lebanon, North Allegheny and Quaker Valley have had German exchange programs for more than two decades, Upper St. Clair for 15 years.

Others are newer, like the partnership of the Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf, which hosted its first Australian student visitors this month.

The result is a wide variety of international programs, some that involve travel and others that don't.

A sampling:

• In the spring, South Side Area School District in Beaver County, which for about seven years has had an exchange with a school in Japan, began an exchange with a school in Zabreh, Czech Republic, with the Americans visiting the Czechs in the spring and the Czechs coming here this fall.

• Bethel Park, which has had a Chinese exchange for about a dozen years, will welcome another delegation next month. A teacher from its sister school will stay for a semester to teach a social studies elective.

• Elementary students at Pittsburgh Phillips write and send drawings to a 9-year-old Nicaraguan who visited them when he was in Pittsburgh in June for surgery on his vocal cords, and to classmates at his rural school.

• For four years, French students at Hampton High School have been building a connection in Mauritania, a West African country where they send letters and pictures to a Peace Corps volunteer who sends the same back from Mauritanian students.

• Some students raise money for other schools. Students at The Ellis School have raised more than $16,000 for a sister school in Afghanistan, and Mt. Lebanon students this year, through the Schools for Schools project of Invisible Children, has raised $5,400 so far for its sister school in Northern Uganda.

• Oakland Catholic High School added Chinese to its curriculum this year in preparation for a school partnership.

Ms. Prucey said some international relationships between schools develop from connections individual educators make.

At Fox Chapel Area High School, a student exchange began after German teacher Andrew Richards taught in a Berlin school in which he was a Fulbright exchange teacher two years ago.

Fox Chapel Area Spanish teacher Myriam Fontes makes arrangements for interested students to stay with families in her native village in Uruguay during the summer.

Before arriving in New Kensington-Arnold in July, Dr. Batterson, then an interim superintendent near Buffalo, N.Y., met Shu-ching Chen, executive director of the Center for Cross-Cultural Exchanges, based in Williamsville, N.Y.

Dr. Chen had helped to develop partnerships of schools in New York state with schools in China. So when Dr. Batterson took his new job, he suggested arranging a partnership and found a district receptive to the idea.

"This is so big for them to have an opportunity to broaden their scope of things," said school board President Beverly Meyer, who accompanied the visitors. "We're not a little bubble here."

When an exchange involves travel, typically anywhere from a handful to a couple dozen Americans go abroad.

Not all of the American travel is school-sponsored, in part because of post-9/11 concerns about liability and insurance.

For example, Mt. Lebanon High School is in its 24th year of an exchange with Stiftische Gymnasium in Düren, Germany, with one side visiting the other every other year.

After Sept. 11, 2001, the Mt. Lebanon school board voted to stop sponsoring international trips. While the Americans didn't go to Germany in 2002, the exchange program survived, with the Americans visiting as private travelers in the summer.

Those involved in international programs say they are invaluable.

In North Allegheny, where the German exchange is 29 years old, the Appman family hosted a German student in October.

"I think it opened up a whole new world for everybody," said Lynn Appman, mother of two students who are studying German: Will, a junior, and Tim, an eighth-grader.

"It had a big impact on my German. It made me want to learn more of it," said Tim.

"It was a real eye-opener as to how people from other places in the world live," said Will.