As the winter weather loses its bitter chill, the crowds in the hallways of Fieldston thin as students and faculty leave campus to attend the spring’s numerous overnight trips. While exciting experiences for all involved, the trips necessitate mechanisms that maintain student safety in circumstances riskier than the usual hum-drum of regular academic activity.
Fieldston runs several overnight trips in the late-winter to spring period, including trips to Model UN conferences, CPAC, Alabama and New Orleans, in addition to several annual spring break trips to international locations such as Japan or Italy. Student safety, an issue deeply personal to parents, faculty and students themselves, carries unique complications on these trips, during which parents entrust Fieldston with the well-being of students for extended periods of time.
According to Director of Operations Teddy O’Rourke, international travel poses the highest potential risk. Because of this, says O’Rourke, in order for Fieldston to approve an international trip, the trip’s potential leader must fill out a form called the International Travel Risk Review Matrix.
“What this matrix does is covers a range of topics, including State Department regulations, State Department travel advisories and CDC travel advisories for those areas,” says O’Rourke. The form surveys the potential trip’s location by accessing crime, weather, local customs and laws, attitudes towards the LGBTQ community, wi-fi access, policies regarding medications and vaccinations, visa requirements and access to clean water. Additionally, trip-leaders must identify a contact at the United States embassy and record the location of the embassy and United States consulates.
O’Rourke, International Trips Coordinator Sheyla Ortiz Pena and Director of Campus Safety Dave Argenzio review the form to assess the risk of the trip and determine its viability. The school only approves trips to locations that pose minimal risk of danger and will discontinue recurring trips should new safety risks emerge, says O’Rourke.
For example, following the September 11th attacks, the school canceled the 9th-grade history trip to Italy, which used to occur yearly during the spring, because of safety concerns surrounding air travel and threats against Americans, according to Form IV Dean John Reyes. “The environment became really dangerous, and we said we can’t guarantee the safety of our kids anymore,” he explains.
For domestic trips, Fieldston does not have the same elaborate risk-assessment framework as it does for international trips, largely because Fieldston has run mostly local trips for many years, says O’Rourke. However, most of Fieldston’s safety protocols, such as identifying the closest health-care sites, still apply regardless of location, and the school thoroughly researches partner organizations involved in the itineraries for new domestic trips.
When planning the itinerary and specific rules for all field trips, Fieldston practices cost-benefit analysis. “So for instance, we may not allow on a trip students to use a pool, right? But on the other hand, we may go to a beach where we know there’s a lifeguard and we know that people have the opportunity to feel included without having to go into the water,” says O’Rourke.
In addition to considering safety in the planning process, the school trains trip leaders and chaperones regarding safety procedures. On Professional Development Day at Fieldston, the school holds a risk seminar for trip leaders that provides several hours of instruction on managing issues on trips, says O’Rourke.
The school recently created a policy stating students and faculty on trips should only communicate via Google Hangouts or Gmail, according to O’Rourke and Ortiz-Pena. Regardless of communication methods, however, students can contact chaperones at any time. “When I’m on those trips, I don’t tend to sleep because I’m worried about the kids,” says Reyes, who regularly chaperones the annual Form IV Boston Trip.
Fieldston ensures all trips have faculty experienced in travel safety who have chaperoned or led other trips in the past. Additionally, in preparation for small trips, at least one chaperone must have training in First Aid skills, while on larger excursions like the Boston trip, multiple chaperones obtain training. Tinia Merriweather, an Ethics teacher who chaperones the Alabama trip, describes the required training, saying, “If the nurses’ office hasn’t seen you or renewed your EpiPen knowledge, then you have to do that [before a trip].”
Fieldston has an extensive policy framework regarding student injuries and health emergencies. Before overnight trips, each student’s parent or guardian must fill out the Overnight Trip Medication Form, which notifies the school of any medications students usually take. Based on the form and other communications with parents, the school nurses compile all relevant medical information for each student.
In the case of injuries or medical emergencies, chaperones use their first-aid training to evaluate the situation, and then contact the student’s parents, the school nurses and the administration. “We’ve had injuries where we’ve had to help kids back to the hotel and call home, and kids have gotten picked up by mom or dad,” says Reyes. In other cases, a chaperone will accompany the students to a healthcare site. The school determines the locations of the nearest hospitals, especially Level 1 Trauma Centers, as well as local pharmacies and urgent cares, in advance of all overnight trips.
The school also handles security threats on a case-by-case basis, bearing in mind the Fieldston emergency management plan. In the case of serious emergencies on trips, chaperones call 911 or the local emergency services and then contact the administration. When chaperones encounter unexpected safety issues with the potential to pose a safety risk to students, trip leaders collaborate with the administration back at Fieldston to determine how to proceed, says History teacher Halle Amore-Bauer, the leader of a trip to a Model UN travel conference in Philadelphia that ended early because of a non-medical safety issue.
The school determined the Model UN conference trip, which 17 students and four faculty members attended in late January, needed to be cut short after an incident involving a sexual threat to a participant at the conference. The participant did not attend Fieldston and the incident occurred in a committee with no Fieldston students present. Chaperones contacted administration immediately after becoming aware of the issue, on the second evening of the trip.
O’Rourke says, “There’s not a play by play or something like that. You have to use your experience and you have to use your judgment in determining what is the best course of action.” He and other administrators analyzed the threat, how the conference organizers handled it and the incident’s potential impact on Fieldston students’ sense of safety, ultimately determining that Fieldston would leave first thing the next morning, about five hours earlier than originally planned.
While the Model UN trip serves as an extreme example of a safety issue, field trip groups that do not encounter external security threats can still face safety concerns such as students becoming lost or engaging in unsafe activity. Because of this, chaperones implement a variety of policies and rules to keep track of students, including regular headcounts and attendance checks during transportation and when arriving and leaving locations.
Merriweather emphasizes how students and faculty should work together to make trips a safe and educational experience. “We do preparation work ahead of time so they will take it seriously and not try to do things against the school rules,” she says, referring to information sessions routinely conducted before trips so chaperones can outline behavioral expectations.
Because dangerous student behavior can cause potential safety threats, the ECFS Student Handbook stresses that school rules still apply while students are off-campus, and any misconduct will result in disciplinary action, which can include removal from a trip. Violations of these rules can include disobeying orders from a chaperone, leaving the group without permission and staying out past curfew. The school can determine behaviors not prohibited in the handbook as prohibited during off-campus trips.
According to the handbook, violations during off-campus trips will follow the student back to school. The school prohibits students from any use of alcohol/substances, including tobacco and e-cigarettes. Students must not intentionally misuse over-the-counter or prescribed medications. If caught with drugs/alcohol, the student will be punished or given therapeutic help, if the school decides it would be appropriate.
In the past, students have largely met behavioral expectations on trips, with a few exceptions. “We’ve had some behavior things, where we’ve sent kids home early, but in general, the majority of students have been really thoughtful and really looked out for one another,” says Reyes.
Students experience some freedom during many trips, including international trips with unsupervised time outside to eat or explore. To maintain safety, chaperones instruct students to remain within a certain area, and frequently hold check-ins in predetermined locations. Students must stay in groups of three or more during unsupervised time outside, ensuring no student will be left alone in an emergency. “If somebody sprains an ankle, then they have somebody to stay with them and somebody to go back to the hotel or group to get help,” explains Librarian Cornelia Locher, who has chaperoned both domestic and international trips.
While Fieldston does not enforce lights-out, all field trips have strict curfews to curb dangerous student activity on overnight trips. After curfew, students cannot leave their rooms for any reason or visit other rooms. To enforce the curfew, chaperones conduct room checks on all rooms and must directly see each student in the room to consider the room-check complete.
Many schools, according to Ortiz-Pena, the coordinator of all international trips, practice door taping: taping the doors of the students’ rooms during curfew and checking the tapes early in the morning for breakage to ensure students did not leave the room overnight. Fieldston does not have a door taping policy, she says, and does not encourage door-taping. However, some Fieldston students, such as Liv Kunzer (IV) and Arden Seghal (IV), have attended a trip during which chaperones taped doors, despite Fieldston´s position on the practice. Several faculty members, including Reyes, who has never taped doors, lack knowledge of Fieldston´s official taping policy, indicating the school has not clearly explained whether to tape or not.
However, other than room-taping, Fieldston’s sole unclarified safety practice, the school has a comprehensive and standardized, yet flexible safety system, encompassing the period before a trip’s approval to the last legs of travel. With robust pre-travel documentation, preventative policies and rules, extensive faculty safety training and thoughtful emergency protocol, Fieldston’s approach to student safety on overnight field-trips should assuage the worries of even the most anxious student or overprotective parent.
