Sister schools in France, Spain

For more than a decade, students at Bishop O’Connell High School in Arlington have been participating in a weeklong exchange program with their counterparts across the Atlantic. For many years, it was a back and forth exchange with students in France — one year O’Connell hosts, and then the next year they travel. But over the past five years, the program has expanded to include a sister school in Spain as well. So in the middle of October, 30 students from O’Connell boarded a plane together at Dulles Airport, bound for Paris. In Paris, half the group headed to the town of Reims — just over an hour and a half drive east of the city — while the rest of the group boarded a connecting flight to Barcelona.