Westbrook High School French teacher Michelle Fournier has been busy getting her house ready for the French family who will live there during the next year.

Across the Atlantic Ocean in Bayeux, France, a French teacher is doing the same for Fournier and her family.

Fournier will be spending the next year in Bayeux in the Normandy region of France as part of the U.S. Department of State’s Fulbright Teacher Exchange Program.

Fournier has been chosen as one of only 170 teachers across the United States to participate in the Fulbright exchange program. Teachers for the prestigious program are chosen based on academic or professional achievement.

Fournier said she applied for the program thinking she wouldn’t be chosen the first time she tried. After an online application and family interview, she was delighted when she received notification in the spring that she had been chosen and an appropriate counterpart had been found in France.

The Fulbright Teacher Exchange Program facilitates mostly one-for-one exchanges between American and foreign teachers at the elementary, secondary and college level. The teachers spend either a semester or a year teaching at each other’s schools and also living in each other’s homes.

Fournier said the program works to find teachers that are compatible not only professionally but also in their private life. In her case, not only did she need a school where she could function well teaching, but she needed a teacher with a home big enough for her family.

“It’s very handy because we don’t have to worry about finding a place to live,” she said. “We can move right in.”

As part of the exchange, Catherine Capel, a French secondary-school English teacher will take Fournier’s place teaching French and Spanish classes this year at Westbrook High. Fournier will take her place in Bayeux, which is about the same size as Westbrook.

Fournier said she’s been cleaning the house, planting a garden and making instructions for how to use the furnace and things like that. She’s also been leaving instructions to make it easier for Capel at the school – who to talk to about what, where to find this and that.

According to Fournier, the two teachers have been living in “parallel universes” as they get ready for their adventures. She said she’s been in constant contact with Capel ironing out the details and they both seem to be doing the same thing at the same time.

“I’m actually a little disappointed because we’re not going to get to hang out really because she seems so cool,” Fournier said of Capel, whom she will meet in Washington, D.C., this week during the program’s orientation.

As to why she’s going, Fournier said she’s wanted to teach in France for many years. While she was in high school at Westbrook, her family hosted a French exchange student for three weeks and she went on a three-week exchange to France herself. In college, she spent her junior year on exchange in Paris and majored in French, hoping to be a teacher when she was done. Right out of college, she taught again in France through a Smith College exchange program.

“Since then, I’ve just tried to think of ways to get back there,” she said. “I have lots of friends there.”

When she got married to her husband Larry Dyhrberg, who is a teacher himself and spent 18 months in Poland in the Peace Corps in the mid 1990s, she said they planned on trying for a Fulbright grant one day. They waited for the time when their two girls were old enough to appreciate it, and then she tried.

Fournier said her two girls – Caroline Dyhrberg, 9, and Annika Dyhrberg, 7 – are excited but a little sad to be leaving their home and a little nervous about starting at a new school in France and speaking French all the time. She thinks they’ll do fine, though, because they already speak French fairly well and will most likely pick it up fluently quickly.

“I’m expecting the French to be hard,” said Caroline Dyhrberg, who said she’s looking forward to eating escargots, “chocolat” and cheese.

As for her husband Larry Dyhrberg, he said he’s “delighted” to be going. A semi-retired teacher who also taught at Westbrook and now teaches at Southern Maine Community College, Dyhrberg said he’s going to write a little and play golf and cook. He said Normandy has 37 golf courses and some of the best food markets in France.

“The biggest kick is to go to these open markets,” he said. “You see mushrooms you’d have to take a mortgage out on a house here to get. It’s going to be wonderful.”

“It’ll be a wonderful adventure for my family and me,” said Fournier, who was expected to leave with her family for Washington, D.C., on Wednesday.

According to Westbrook School Superintendent Stan Sawyer, Fournier is the fourth teacher from Westbrook schools in the last eight years to earn a slot in the Fulbright exchange program. He said it benefits the teachers but also benefits the students because the teachers come back with a high level of energy.