It was 3 a.m. on a Saturday and more than a dozen cars were heading for a dark parking lot on lower Broadway. Presentation School’s 17 eighth graders were about to board a bus for San Francisco International airport as the first leg of a five-day trip to Washington, D.C.
They left only hours after performing in the school’s spring musical, “The Jungle Book,” but still had plenty of energy. Once in the nation’s capital, they were on the go, nonstop from 7 every morning until 10 each evening.
“It was such a great trip,” said eighth grader Ella Joyner-Shone. “I was exhausted when I got home. We were walking at top speed, sightseeing, and jumping on and off the bus and listening to our tour guide more than 12 hours a day!”
The trip in late March included stops in Williamsburg, Jamestown and Mount Vernon as well as time at a dozen major monuments, museums, cemeteries and memorials in and around Washington. Every aspect of the trip was taken care of by leading educational student tour company, Worldstrides, including the flights, bus travel, hotels, meals, films, lectures and tours.
Special excursions inside both the White House and the Capitol Building were arranged by Presentation’s Director Nancy Fischman, with thanks to Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey’s office.
Said Fischman, “Each year, 250,000 students take a WorldStrides trip somewhere in the U.S. each year. We knew that their curriculum was top-notch and that would take good care of our children, and they did.”
The eighth grade students had been studying U.S. government and history with humanities teacher Vicki Carroll. “They each became an ‘expert’ on one major site they would be visiting, and used power point, posters, models, or written reports to ‘teach’ their peers,” Caroll explained.
To help cover as much of the cost of the trip as possible, the class held fundraisers from car-washes to babysitting to yard sales. Upon returning home, each student was required to complete a 30-page journal/research assignment recapping and expounding upon what they learned at each itinerary point.
The trip was chaperoned by eighth grade teacher Natalie Dusak, her husband, Frank Dusak and Presentation’s kindergarten teacher and eighth grade parent, Moya Jones Neely.
“I loved watching and observing the students absorb the various sites,” said Natalie Dusak. “The Holocaust Museum’s powerful images and exhibits really hit home with the students in a way that just reading about something in a book frequently can’t. The students even talked to a Holocaust survivor. Their experiences were so vivid that the memories of this trip will stay with them forever.”
Jones Neely added, “Vietnam, Korean and the Pentagon memorials made a deep impression on the students. They thought and talked a lot about the impact of war and terrorism on so many lives, and each memorial’s unique design.”
Presentation’s seventh grade class is already getting excited for next year’s trip. In the past, Presentation’s eighth graders have traveled to the Olympic Park Institute for their primary field experience but Fischman felt Washington, D.C. was the perfect educational complement to the school’s cross-disciplinary studies in American History in the eighth grade year.
