Extra-curricular trip: Parents complain about ‘voluntary-compulsory’ school trips

With the beginning of the school year, school trips began. Schools are especially active in holding them while Indian summer is in the yard. Travel agencies involved in children’s tourism are rejoicing: requests from school groups have returned to pre-pandemic levels. But for many parents, traveling with the whole class is additional stress.

After talking with moms and dads, as well as with teachers and “children’s” travel agencies, we found out what doubts and fears anyone has, and which of these really need to be approached with caution.

– In our school, group trips are required, – complains Irina, the mother of a seventh-grader from one of the Moscow schools. – At parent meetings, they simply put before the fact: we rent so much, we go there. At least that’s what happened last year. And this time, at the meeting, it was reported that the class teacher, together with the little storyteller, would take our children to Nizhny Novgorod for five whole days in September. And I don’t want my daughter to go!

– Expensive, right?

– Not cheap, but that’s not the point. Perhaps these are my personal fears, but right now I don’t want my child to go somewhere separately from me. I feel like I have a right to it.

– Well, tell your class teacher!

– Already said. But she replied that I was spreading panic, setting a bad example for other parents and children, and spoiling my own child. If the whole class is going, then mine should go too. And they added that this is not just a walk, but a trip related to the fact that our class will be going through history this year.

The survey shows that many parents agree with Irina, who do not want to let their schoolchildren go on group vacations longer than one day.

– Here is someone who wrote this in the chat, and immediately let’s repeat everything one after another! – the head teacher of the school in New Moscow is fuming, where parents are also rebelling against the announced five-day excursion to Pskov. – Some even hint that it is, they say, the teachers at the expense of the class want to ventilate. Yes, our teachers accompany the children, but not because they want to “ventilate”, but because one adult escort is assigned for every ten students, and not just teachers go, but subject teachers, with whose program for this academic year the trip is connected. And our trips are all thematic – the history of Russia, geography, biology, and so on.

But domestic children’s tour operators assure that all Russian parents, and especially those from big cities, try to send their child on a trip with the school as soon as possible, because it is educational, safe and inexpensive.

– And where do they want to go most often? – I’m interested in one of the most self-confident children’s travel agencies.

– It depends on the class, because we have different programs. For example, senior classes from the first days of September apply for career guidance tours. This is a visit to the leading universities of St. Petersburg, Moscow and other major cities on request. Of course, in agreement with these universities. If schoolchildren are from the periphery, then such an excursion takes up to 5 days when placed in a comfortable hotel with three meals a day. For elementary school students there are educational tours, for high school – military-patriotic ones.

– How is that?

– Well, for example, for elementary school there is a trip to the places of Ivan Susanin, the birthplace of Baba Yaga is also nearby. They just pass the opera Ivan Susanin by music, and they still remember fairy tales. To the village of Konstantinovo, to the homeland of the “calico” singer Rus Yesenin, to Plyos and so on, all within the Golden Ring. And the military-patriotic – in the places of battles with the Nazi invaders: the Moscow region, Orel, Kursk, Volgograd. Usually the direction is chosen depending on where the school itself is located.

The teachers who most often accompany children’s groups on trips to their native cities and villages are historians, geographers, military instructors with physical instructors and class teachers. All of them are optimistic.

“The main thing that I have learned from experience is that you can’t overload children on a trip,” says a 32-year-old history teacher from the Moscow region. – That year, two more colleagues and I took the 7th graders to Kazan. The program was very dense, interesting, we got carried away. But when the children returned, the first thing they told their parents was that they were being bullied, that the whole trip was for the pleasure of the teachers themselves, and they didn’t go on school trips anymore. And the casket just opened: we did not leave them free time to communicate. They got tired after a busy day, and in the evening, instead of free time, we showed them a thematic film or arranged a discussion of what they saw. They wanted the best, but apparently it is not possible.

As for the school-age excursionists themselves, the majority of them are just completely in favor of trips as a whole class. The reason, however, corresponds to the agility of age: everything is better than hanging around at the desk. But there are also those who hold approximately the same opinion about group trips from the school, which was expressed to us by a ninth-grader of a prestigious metropolitan gymnasium (she asked not to name her name):

– Last year, they ripped off 30 thousand rubles from their parents for three days in Smolensk. We arrived by train, the hotel is the most ordinary, we eat in the canteen – why such money? Found out by accident. In the evening, one of our girls urgently needed our class teacher, and she already went to her room (there were four teachers with us, they lived on another floor and not two in a room, like us, but one at a time). Well, that girl went to the floor to the teachers, knocked on the classroom door, she probably thought it was someone else, and opened it. There she has a suite with a jacuzzi, floor-to-ceiling windows. Well, we immediately understood where our parents’ money went.

Well, everyone has their own truth here, and we asked experts in extra-curricular education and lawyers whether group trips in a secondary educational institution can be “voluntary-compulsory”?

– Organized excursions at the school are obligatory only if they take place during school hours and are free, – Tatyana Voronkova, the methodologist, answers. – If, for example, at your school Saturday is a school day, but instead of lessons, the class is taken to the museum, then failure to appear will be equated with absenteeism. Or a medical certificate from a doctor. Parents of minors have the right to refuse excursions and trips outside school hours. The only exceptions are the so-called “accompanying the program” trips, because now the school is obliged to provide not only knowledge, but also general development, erudition. But educational activities are not always possible during school hours and are free – for example, a trip to Yasnaya Polyana, Melikhovo or a museum in another city. Teachers strongly recommend such trips to both children and parents, but they still cannot force schoolchildren to take them. As for long-distance and expensive trips initiated by the school, this is a purely voluntary matter.