Environmental school is a week long trip to camp Calumet in Freedom, NH. You heard me right, A Week-Long-School-Trip in 5th grade! (the Freedom, NH part is overkill if you ask me... really, there's no need to lay it on so thick!) I wonder how many parents have schools that are offering these kinds of experiences? I am so grateful that we have stumbled into an elementary school that does. I KNOW that there are not enough programs like this, that our kids don't have these opportunities enough. The reason I know this is two-fold. One, I know that the district we left in NY does not have this type of trip, I think they do a one day end of year blow out somewhere, but certainly not a week at an environmental school wading in marsh and canoeing across a lake. Two, even in our school, three quarters of tonights meeting was spent allaying parent fears about sending their kids on this trip. Addressing questions about meals, schedule, how bunk mates are decided. Sharing details about student/counselor ratios, safety measures for boat/lake activities, and explaining why it was not a good idea to send kids with cell phones or I-pods. In other words, even with a long history, parents today are skeptical about this kind of program and need to be soothed, cajoled even.
I share these details not because I think it's wrong that organizing a trip like this requires jumping through some hoops, but rather to point out that it does. A LOT of hoops, and work, and explaining-of-benefits, and anticipating problems so there is a plan to deal with them. Some of it is par for the course, some of it is absolutely absurd, and much of it lies somewhere in between. A situation that has evolved out of years of over-protective parents, nervous school districts, accidents made worse by lawsuits and hand-wringing where blame is squarely placed in a superintendents lap and edicts are in turn passed down.
The sad truth is that all this history and all of our growing concerns and policy based on lessons learned, has left our kids with far fewer opportunities to experience field trips, to explore their world independent from mom and dad, to learn in one of the best ways I know how. The director of the camp said in his presentation tonight that he went to a program like the one our kids will be doing when he was in 6th grade, and while he doesn't remember his teacher's name from that year, he remembers almost every detail of that week long trip. This is exactly what I'm talking about. I remember those trips too. Every trip. From bus rides to the Natural History Museum in New York, to our 6th grade camping trip out east, to the several times that I left for school in the morning only to return to my own house for a field trip at the farm! (Yes, I took a field trip to my own back yard several times as a kid!) Ask anyone, and I think you will find that they too remember those trips of their childhoods with a detail far more crisp than most other things. Yet the number of trips, and the length of trips seems to diminish year after year. Trips like this Environmental School especially, because they are more costly, more dangerous, take so much more work to get together... someone decides it's not worth it, and it just stops one year. Picking it back up is so much harder. It doesn't get picked up.
The economic issues that began to surface in school budgets a few years ago have been huge contributors as well. I know at the farm we got many calls from districts who wanted to continue running programs with us but were no longer taking off site trips- at all. Some of those schools were still able to fund an in-school program with us, others just eliminated special programs entirely. I remember feeling the tragedy of these decisions- not as a business person, but as a parent and a teacher. These trips and programs and experiences are important-- critical. We are sacrificing more than we can measure when we take these experiences away from our kids.
So, I sat in that room tonight feeling grateful. Grateful for the opportunity that is around the corner for my 10 year old, and grateful that my 4 year old will be here for 6 years, in a school and community that shares my feelings on this subject enough that they continue to jump through the hoops... year after year.
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