Budget cuts have played a role in their disappearance
MARQUETTE -- The votes are in and our facebook viewers wanted us to take a closer look at field trips Friday. What is their educational value, and how have they been impacted by the current education budget cuts?
In the past several years the way most of us experienced field trips has drastically changed. Now, they aren't allocated in the general fund budget at all for most schools.
Instead they're financed through fundraising efforts by students or parent teacher groups. Despite that obstacle, some teachers go out of their way to promise their students what they call 'a real world experience.'
A lot has changed in Shannon Ruiz's eight years at Gwinn Schools.
Despite budget cut restraints, she's promised to send her French students on a trip that may not span across the globe, but a day in the 'real world.'
"Mix it up a little, it's not like 'math this,' 'science that,'" says eighth grader Bobby Proulx. "It's music and walking around and doing other things and going different places."
Friday they met with foreign exchange students, listened to folk music and experienced French cuisine.
"They're meeting people in the field of their study, they can engage with and just realize what's out there," says French instructor Shannon Ruiz.
But it's not entirely cheap, there's a $200 bill just to bus a group of about 50 students to Northern Michigan University.
That money comes from student and parent fundraising by the French Club.
"There just isn't that much money to go around for them, so whenever we do have the opportunity, we snatch it up as soon as possible," says Ruiz.
In some school districts financing previously came from the general fund, but that's no longer the case in many U.P. schools.
Facebook fan Darla Manninen writes: "I'd love to see how schools that charge teachers and parents bus drivers wage and bus gas justify that money for an 'educational' field trip when the buses are on the road all the time for sporting events. Whatever happened to education first?"
Superintendents say that's just way the budgets have been appropriated. Funds for gas and driver wages for sports travel are allocated in the athletic budget out of the general fund, and can't be spent for other purposes.
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