David Wolfe’s Legacy - Building Bridges

إرث・遗产・遺産・Наследие

In 1990, David Wolfe founded and became principal of the Shawnee Mission Center for International Studies until his retirement in 1998. Here, high school students could study the languages and cultures of Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, or Russian for two hours daily, achieving high proficiency. In addition to the language, they would take their appropriate social studies (international geopolitics) requirement. Ethnic festivals, town meetings, and cultural programs would occur.

Beginning in 1993, live, distance-learning, interactive instruction in Japanese and Russian was delivered from the television studio at the Center to client high school students in southeast Kansas. On-site visits by the instructors enhanced the learning. David was responsible for district sponsorship of international organizations that annually hosted up to 50 international students across the five Shawnee Mission School District (USD #512) high schools. David established international partnerships and exchanges, beginning in 1979 between Shawnee Mission South and Bietigheim-Bissingen, Germany, which continues today as the only sister city of Overland Park, Kansas.

Student and teacher exchanges -"Bridges"- were developed between the school district and Iwate Prefecture, Japan; School 56, Moscow, Russia; Xi'an, China; the American School, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; and École Toulouse Lautrec, Sèvres, France through the Shawnee Mission Center for International Studies. USD #512 ceased operations at the Center in the late 2000s and assigned each language to a specific high school. Currently, Chinese and Japanese courses have been phased out, while Arabic and Russian courses continue to be taught.

David Wolfe passed away in November 2025, but his vision of building bridges lives on in all of us who attended the Shawnee Mission Center for International Studies. It is that passion for being globally united with one another and for sharing culture and language that has inspired us to start the Center for International Studies Foundation, our educational nonprofit organization. We hope to continue building bridges, teaching and sharing culture and language, supporting those studying international languages, and creating new sister city relationships.