Seniors deserve a school-sanctioned trip

Senior year is one of the most significant times during high school. It’s the year everything starts turning into a “last” — the last first day, the last spirit week, and the last time you sit and learn in the same classroom with your childhood friends. But at the same time, this is also the transition from childhood to young adult life brimmed with new experiences, new responsibilities, and new chances to have those ever special firsts out in the big beautiful world.

Students involved in choir, band, or language programs at our school have special opportunities to have these experiences. Buses, hotels, cities; unfamiliar sights that hum with the dazzling intensity of something new. These moments coalesce into living, breathing memories that can define one’s high school experience.

Giving seniors the chance to make one more shared memory and expose them to new cultures and environments, and a moment away from the stress of grades and college applications, may be the last chance where everyone unites before they go their separate ways.

Field trips allow students to experience new cultures, engage with the world beyond the classroom, meet new people, and grow in ways traditional instruction cannot provide. According to the NEA, 89 percent of adults said that trips had a “had a positive, lasting impact on their education and career because [they] made them more engaged, intellectually curious, and interested in and out of school.”

Of the trips that happen now, most of them are limited to students in specific programs, unofficial beach days, or last-minute plans within social circles and friends groups. These experiences are enjoyable for those who attend, but they are exclusive. Students without reliable transportation, flexible schedules, or extra money to spend are excluded. For a school as large and diverse as PHS, it is unfortunate that a significant portion of these upperclass students finish high school without ever getting the opportunity to go on an official school-sponsored trip.

All of this being said, there are still a couple of undeniable problems with a whole class trip. These being, primarily, logistical as well as financial. Our school has classes made up of hundreds of students, which makes taking an entire grade on a trip an incredible challenge between chartering enough buses, booking enough hotel rooms, getting enough food, and of course, having enough money to supply all of these things in the first place. Funding is finite even for language and music trips, thus often resulting in costs falling on students — a cost not every family can afford to pay.

A field trip or group activity may not fix every disparity in experience of the past four years, but it gives seniors a treasurable event to look forward to: one shared moment that belongs to all of us. After all of the grit and work this class has gone through together, they deserve more than just an unremarkable ending — they deserve a final send-off worthy of warm nostalgia and satisfying closure from this chapter in their lives.