Compared with students in elementary and middle school, high school students attend few field trips.

“I don’t know why we don’t go on field trips when we’re so close to D.C.  We have every museum and most of them are free,” senior Rosemary Jones said.

Being located in Rockville is very conducive to field trips because we are only 30 to 45 minutes away from Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Both cities provide many educational opportunities to gain new insights on topics being taught in school. Visiting museums and national monuments are only some of the opportunities that high school students are currently being deprived of.

Senior Vasilia Hangemanole said, “In middle school we were able to visit the Holocaust Museum which gave me a broader perspective than the history books we used in class.” For teachers, however, field trips have numerous obstacles.

“I would love to have them, but paperwork takes forever to get approval and then there are the logistics: getting buses, getting chaperones, getting substitutes, creating lesson plans for students who don’t attend, and also collecting money and forms,” English teacher Sean Pang said.

Unlike elementary and middle school when it was simple to send the entire fourth grade class on a field trip, sending 300-plus students to one place is not as easy. Students may also not realize that there are field trips going on inside the school because they have not been invited to attend

“Field trips are great because they expand your knowledge on the subject,” principal Billie-Jean Bensen said. However, she pointed out that because of Maryland’s past with the sniper scares and the post 9/11 fears, the procedures used to put together a field trip are much more difficult and time-consuming.

Students should be able to explore new and exciting ways to learn. They should be able to propose ideas for field trips at the beginning of the semester based on upcoming curriculum. This way the administration will have plenty of time to review the ideas and the teachers will be able to complete all the paperwork without being stressed out by time constraints.