Wesleyan students' Paris stop canceled

Friday night's terrorist attacks in Paris have cut short a European trip for a group of 20 people representing Macon's Wesleyan College.

A group of 15 students in Wesleyan's Executive Master of Business Administration degree program, along with three guests and two college faculty members, were scheduled to visit Paris in the coming days. But their plans changed after the shootings and bombings in the French city that left at least 129 people dead.

"We are all safe and sound," Stacie Barrett, assistant Executive MBA program director and assistant business professor, said Saturday by phone from Florence, Italy. "We are in no imminent danger at all. ... We're nowhere near (the violence), and we're not going anywhere near it."

The group plans to return to Macon either Monday or Tuesday, she said.

Barrett said the students left Atlanta on Nov. 8 and flew to Rome, and later to Florence. Paris was to be their last stop before returning to Georgia. Each class of students in the program goes on a 10-day study-abroad trip that gives them a chance "to study business in an international market," Barrett said.

Barrett conferred with others at Wesleyan, and they collectively made the decision to bring the students home.

"As a representative of the college, my first reaction is to do what is in the best interest of the students," she said.

To contact writer Andy M. Drury, call 744-4477 or on Twitter@maconpaperboy.

This story was originally published November 14, 2015 at 5:56 PM with the headline "Wesleyan students' Paris stop canceled ."