FARMINGTON – Kathleen Welch, an assistant professor of Community Health and Education at the University of Maine at Farmington, has been awarded a $10,000 grant from the Maine Community Foundation to help disadvantaged high school students in Russia be better equipped for college.

Welch will leave next week for a two-week stay in Emva, a rural village in the Komai Republic.

The main goal is to help the students become more proficient in English so that they can enter the university, she said. The task will include teaching the teachers, she added.

But, the bulk of the grant will help the Russian students have an opportunity to study at a university 200 miles away. The funds will pay tuition, books and travel for a one-week experience four times a year, she said.

The experience, she said, is similar to a local Maine program, Partnerships for Success, directed by Dori Fellman, who has shared techniques with Welch that work and don’t work while preparing Maine students for college.

“I’ve tried so many things and know what works,” Fellman said, so instead of making Welch “recreate the wheel,” the two are seeing how they can work together.

The Partnerships for Success helps younger students start to be aware of college early, she said. Through the program, eighth-graders at Dirigo in Dixfield spend a week at a college in Quebec City while Jay eighth-graders stayed at Boston University and visited Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she said. A class from SAD 43 spent time at USM.

Creating that interest on the college campus helps the student to come back and realize college is not only accessible but what courses are needed to get them there, she said.

The first grant between UMF and SAD 21, Fellman said, started in 1999. After that first six-year grant, Jay and SAD 43 have joined the partnership.

At the start, 37 percent of all graduates at Dirigo went on to post secondary education, the number rose to 82 percent at the end of the grant. The rise resulted from doing a lot with the kids, she said.

With a bachelor’s degree in Russian language and literature, Welch, who has lived and worked in Russia, feels the cross cultural experience for the Russian students is so important. Universities want that, she said. They want students exposed to other cultures. They’ll be meeting an American, she added.

“I feel like an ambassador as foreign relations are so low and young people need to have hope to make changes,” she said.

While there, the students will also be exposed to local humor when Mt. Blue High School’s Curtain Raisers perform improv comedy through a teleconference at the high school on Dec. 7.

“We plan to share our sense of humor and what makes up American improv,” Curtain Raiser Director Dan Ryder said Wednesday. “If we can share a lot of the same senses of humor, it’s a bridge between two different cultures, and if we can laugh together, then that’s huge.”

The 12 Mt. Blue students, ranging from freshmen to seniors, will have the opportunity to talk with kids from somewhere else.

“Hopefully it will be one hour when all these kids laugh together, a positive experience that they’ll never get another chance to do,” he said.

Welch will see the Curtain Raisers for the first time with the Russian students from a small high school in Russia.