You wake up on a crisp morning. You arrive at school before everybody else. You watch as all your friends spill onto the bus. Looking out the window, you see a blur of trees passing by. This is the excitement. The excitement is a hallmark of a field trip experience.
Unfortunately, as students grow older, these experiences become rarer. Field trips, which were once a staple of education, are offered less despite their important role in enhancing learning and providing real-world experiences.
Field trips help forge connections between classroom learning and real-world situations, offering students a tangible understanding of what they’re learning.
Additionally, field trips bring students closer to activities and environments they might otherwise never get to experience. For example, North Penn High School offers a trip to Citizens Bank Park, home of the Philadelphia Phillies. Students get the chance to tour the press rooms and even go onto the field. This unique opportunity brought students closer to interests they might pursue in the future.
“If [field trips] can tie into student’s interests and especially give them a view into something they can do either in college or in a profession or give them a glimpse into the future, they’re invaluable,” North Penn High School Principal Kyle Hassler said. “I think they’re really something that’s important to students just to kind of give them a fully rounded experience in high school.”
Cost is always an obstacle for any event, and field trips are no exception. Organizing and funding a field trip for over a thousand students is expensive.
“Obviously if we go to something that charges admission, there’s always the question: is it something that legally we’re allowed to use district funds for or does it have to go back to the students? Then there’s the question, how much is it,” Hassler explained. “Some of the other things people forget is we have to pay for the buses. We have to pay for the gas because it’s additional to what the buses usually run. There are all of these different things that we have to pay as a district. Part of the way that we can offset that is we can have students pay for part of it. So I know some trips we have students pay for, but we also don’t want to have costs be a limiting factor for students, we want it to be accessible for everybody. It’s really difficult, but we try to find a happy medium where we can have the experiences but not, you know, have the cost.”
North Penn, however, has not stopped at trying to find ways around the obstacles and continue to bring field trips to their school. One interesting program offered at the high school is the Community Hosted Internship Program (CHIP). Although this program isn’t necessarily the same as an average “field trip, it offers students with real world experiences that tie along with what careers they are interested in.
“Mr. Frey runs our CHIP program, and what our CHIP program does is it gives students experiences with jobs in the community. And a lot of times, what they’ll do is Mr. Frey will work with different community members or different industries, jobs, factories, and stuff like that, and they will actually pay the cost to take our students out there,” Hassler said. It’s definitely something we’re exploring, we’re always looking to explore and bring in new partners, but that’s something that’s definitely we’ve seen an increase in after Covid, a lot more of the community is looking to partner with us, and create more experiences.”
Field trips, and programs like CHIP, are essential in a well-rounded high school experience. They allow students to connect with their passions and gain insights into their futures. While cost may pose challenges, the rewards are worth the effort. North Penn has already shown its commitment to offering more opportunities for students, and it’s time to keep pushing for more.