NYC is a great choice!
I live in a suburb just outside NYC. Last year about 14 of us hosted a group of Swedish hs students. They were great! They were smart, their english was incredible and they were interested in everyting. They didn't spend a lot of time in our houses because they went into the city just about every day, but they had serious assignments to observe our culture. (Each one had a different aspect to cover.) They did spend 1-2 days in our town, in classes with our kids, going out at night to the movies and other kids homes. This was during the Yankee-Boston ALCS series, and one was lucky enough to be with a family with an extra playoff ticket. He went home with tons of pin-striped stuff!
Our town and HS are very diverse, the Swedes were in an incredible variety of homes. One was with a one-child family, one shared a room with a bunch of kids of a family of 9 kids. The large family is a born-again Christian family, about 5 families were Jewish, the rest Catholic & 1 one other protestant. I think all the families were white, but the hs is very mixed so they were with lots of black & hispanic kids too. One stayed in an apt, the rest in private homes. They were spread among the real affluent areas and the middle class homes. We tried to match the Swede & host by gender, but otherwise it was pretty random. Worked perfectly!
Among the must-sees on their lists?? Times Square, Ground Zero, Chinatown, a movie theatre (their english was good enough for that!), Empire State building, shopping, shopping, shopping!
Since it was a few weeks before Thanksgiving, we had a pot-luck traditional American Thanksgiving dinner for them at the hs one night. We all shared our impressions of eachother. What an experience for ALL the kids.
Oh, when I mentioned to my husband that we were going to have an 18 year old Swedish girl with us for a week, he thought he'd died and gone heaven.
Seriously, she was very smart, polite, and an impeccable english speaker. And drop-dead beautiful too.
BTW: The Yank-offs still s-ck!
We agreed to take a French student from a similar program about 20 years ago in a similar sounding diverse town in NJ, thru a friend of a friend thing.
When we showed up the US volunteer organizer was short 2 more host families, so we ended up with 3 boys.
My wife and I had a good time with the Frogs (as we called them), John Phillipe, Eric Phillipe and Phillipe Phillipe.
Other than the guest bathroom smelling of Canoe or some other aftershave it was fine.
We took them down to DC for a day and dinner in Georgetown at Le Petit Auberge for crepes. The kid from Brittany thought his mother must be cooking in the back. As we walked thru the town I finally got to make the point that the English architecture here is AMERICAN, the Chinese food here is AMERICAN, the French-style city plan is AMERICAN... its all AMERICAN. That's what AMERICAN means.
They got 3 of the French girls on the tour to cook a dinner party for us at our house on Bastille Day. One girl wore a Chanel dress (my wife said) and dinner was pretty good. I wanted to get into the French spirit and I played my Edith Piaf records for them. They hated it but were grateful that at least it wasn't Charles Aznevour, like their Dads' would have played.
3 years later we hosted 2 girls, since we then had a 1 year old son. They were bitches and no fun at all.
You never know.
I do not intend to offend you, but your phrase, "Our town and HS are very diverse,...", shows that you live somewhere where PC "values" hold sway.
I have news for you, the VAST MAJORITY of towns and HSs in America are "very diverse".
Notwithstanding the left's lies and propaganda.
Holding "diversity" up as a sort of PC shield, makes me want to puke.
But I understand why you would think that way, living where you do. So near "the hive".
My cousins took in a Yugoslavian girl as a foreign exchange student one spring many years ago. She was from Sarajevo. My cousin had two teenaged daughters and thought this would be a great way to expand their horizons.
The high-school-aged exchange student sniffed that everything was "too American", stayed up all night, slept all day (the teens dubbed her "Dracula"), spent more time at the mall with other exchange students than with my cousins and the whole experience seemed unfulfilling.
One day, a couple of years later, a letter arrived from the exchange student. Her city was at the heart of the war in Bosnia and she could no longer feel safe walking the streets. She lived in fear that any day somebody might come to kill her or her family and that she might have to be relocated at any time.
But the cousins had taken her to church a few times while she was in the States and she remembered those words and became a Christian in her moment of crisis. She was writing to apologize for being such an ungrateful snot while visiting America and how she wished she could do things differently now.
I know my cousins prayed for her. Quite a powerful story.
Kudos to you for hosting those exchange students.