Two Travel Stories
As a fairly new, still-unmarried teacher nearly twenty years ago, I was ecstatic when offered the chance to help chaperone a theater trip to New York City. Getting away at that time was easy, and there was no way I could pass up the opportunity to see Wicked, Phantom of the Opera, and The Lion King, along with the chance to (for the first time) walk through Central Park, see the Statue of Liberty, and more. I excitedly packed, thinking of all the cool sights and experiences ahead of me.
Years later, I still have fond memories of the three productions, but I don’t remember much of the rest of the itinerary. What I do remember is the hour-long conversations with students about what superpower we would choose and why, the five pounds of fortune cookies one senior boy purchased and shared with us for days after a visit to Chinatown, and the incredibly awkward experience of taking a group of students to the not-so-appropriate production of 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee after waking up at five in the morning for rush seating.
A few years later, I was again excited to be offered the chance to chaperone—this time, it was a June trip to London. Two of my English colleagues were the trip leaders, but they wanted a third (and male) chaperone, and I was fortunate enough to tag along. I expected a repeat of my last experience—building relationships with students while seeing Buckingham Palace, the Globe Theatre, and Stratford-upon-Avon. My biggest concerns centered around travel logistics, such as navigating customs and the Tube with highschoolers. This was my first school trip overseas.
It was also my first time in a police cruiser. And my first time in an English police station, and my first time filing police reports. One of our students—against all of our pre-trip suggestions—packed, and then had stolen from him, thousands of dollars of electronics, including a laptop, an iPad, an expensive Canon camera, and Beats by Dr. Dre headphones. Hours of police reports, a missed tour, and many suppressed curse words later, I was second guessing the notion of ever traveling with students again.
The Challenges of Student Travel
Since those first two trips, I’ve had the opportunity to chaperone and lead other student trips. I’ve floated on the Dead Sea with students and visited the Jamaican Deaf Village, and I now oversee our school’s Winterim program. Winterim is a two-week mini-semester in January that allows students to take a specialized course on campus (e.g., Fun with Physics, Watercolor Painting, Youth Police Academy), do an internship in the community (with veterinarians, cosmetologists, or lawyers), or take domestic and international trips led by staff members.
In the past three years alone, we’ve sent student groups to Vietnam, Australia, Oman, the Grand Canyon, Kenya, France, and many more destinations. In just those three years, over six hundred students have chosen to travel. When speaking to parents and students, I almost always mention that our school’s Winterim program has now sent students to six of seven continents. (We’ve been to Patagonia, but Antarctica has yet to be proposed.) The feedback on the trips is amazing, as students have life-changing experiences.
But in those same meetings, I always also speak to some of the downsides of student travel. I try to be open and honest about how our offerings don’t always go exactly as planned, and I hear about how they aren’t initially received by all with the same positivity.
Cost and equity are the first, major concerns that come to mind when it comes to student travel.
Cost and equity are the first, major concerns that come to mind when it comes to student travel. And it’s a rising concern—literally and figuratively. When we started our Winterim program fourteen years ago, trip leaders felt that, for a trip to have a chance at success, it needed to stay under $3,000. In a post-pandemic world, our trip leaders have a difficult time keeping international trips under $4,000, and we have had trips over $5,500. This becomes a major hurdle for families that want to give their students these opportunities, and it can also divide a community, creating a line between those that can afford to travel and those that can’t.
We have tried to address these concerns in a variety of ways. Our school, when starting Winterim, intentionally budgeted for financial aid for Winterim travelers. And in the past few years, we have had some generous donors (several of whom are parents whose students benefited from the program) create an endowment that allows us to grant scholarships to some travelers that apply. For schools that may not have the same accessibility to resources, the travel company EF Tours can set up a points program for your school (normally reserved for trip leaders) that allows programs to earn scholarship dollars that make travel accessible to students who might not otherwise have the ability to afford it. And lastly, we let our ninth graders (who aren’t eligible to travel) know that it’s a part of our program that they can plan for. Many of our students wait until their senior year to travel, giving them three years’ worth of part-time jobs to earn enough money to travel before they graduate.
The other major concern with student travel is the headache that bringing teenagers anywhere can generate.
The other major concern with student travel is the headache that bringing teenagers anywhere can generate. Like the young man on my London trip, students don’t always make great life choices. He disregarded all of our advice and paid the price (or at least his insurance provider did) for bringing valuables with him unnecessarily. Other students over the years have made various poor decisions. From theft to vaping to alcohol consumption to the group of senior girls who thought getting tattoos while in Brazil was a good idea, traveling with students can bring with it a host of frustrations. Although there will always be students that push the limits, having clear policy and following through on consequences when problems do arise is key. We work hard to explain that travel is a privilege and not a right, we don’t offer travel opportunities to students that have already shown they aren’t responsible enough, and when students surprise us with poor behavior on trips, we try to support leaders with follow through on consequences. Students have lost privileges for the remainder of the trip, lost privileges when they return home, and have even been sent home midway through their trip at their parents’ expense.
The Benefits of Student Travel
At Grand Rapids Christian High School, one of our aims is to create “Lifelong Learners” who are “prepared to live a life of discovery and wonder in God’s world” (“Portrait of a Graduate”). And although that happens in our regular classes, student travel takes it much further. Students have the opportunity to experience things they would normally only read about.
“What I gained from this trip was not only a deeper understanding of Kenyan culture, but also insight into the similarities of people around the world that make us human.”
Last year, we had a small group of students travel to Kenya. In post-Winterim evaluations, one student on that trip responded, “In my journey, alongside other activities, I observed a variety of animals in a safari visit, served at an elementary school in the Kibera slum, met and hiked with village elders through the mountains, and was blessed with a first-hand experience of what life in Nairobi, Kenya, looks like. What I gained from this trip was not only a deeper understanding of Kenyan culture, but also insight into the similarities of people around the world that make us human.” Although we try to instill some of this in our students through world literature or social studies classes, the experience of being there undoubtedly makes a stronger mark. Another student affirmed this in her reflection: “I don’t just want to be a tourist in a foreign country, but I want to taste their food, I want to participate in their traditions, I want to see the beauty of their landscapes and of their wildlife, and most of all, I want to truly experience the diversity of this world.”
Some of that learning is discipline specific as well. This is an abridged version of this article. To read more, subscribe to the print or digital edition of Christian Educators Journal.
Work Cited
“Portrait of a Graduate.” Grand Rapids Christian Schools, 11 March 2021, https://www.grcs.org/about-us/handbooks/handbook-details/~board/handbooks/post/portrait-of-a-graduate. Accessed 2 December 2024.