We love our charter school. One of the things they boast as a perk of enrollment are school-organized field trips. These are very cool in theory, but we've only attended one in all our years of homeschooling with them. Here are some reasons that we haven't been doing field trips with the school:
- Sometimes they're set for days that don't work for our schedule.
- While we can use our educational funds to pay for the student's participation, I would have to pay for my ticket (and enrolled younger sibling's ticket) out of pocket. We're too poor for that.
- Sometimes bringing a younger sibling isn't even allowed. Getting a babysitter just isn't worth the hassle.
- Dropping off your kid is not an option. A parent has to attend.
- Sign ups for trips fill up fast and sometimes I just don't know if we'll be able to attend far enough in advance for when enrollment opens.
- The one time we did go, it was a pain in the butt to get my ticket paid for and sorted out in advance of the trip.
- I haven't been convinced that any trips would be worth the hassle and expense. I would rather spend the kids' instructional funds on other things.
- I thought that school field trips would be a good way to build a community within our school. But our school is just too large (several counties) and diverse so you wouldn't necessarily see the same families each time. When we did go to that one trip, there was no effort to connect us as a community. We were all supposed to gather at the front entrance so we could check in and then we were free to go our separate ways, which every family did.
There you have it. So we've just been doing our own thing. We'll occasionally plan field trips that are free or cheap and local with friends or just by ourselves. But now our school has made a new resource available to us...
Explorer Field Trips, Field Trip Kits!
We can use instructional funds to purchase these kits (which include admission tickets and educational activity guides) and then use them whenever works for our family. There is even provision to allow my ticket as the parent to be paid for from student funds. And this is the perfect year for us because now all four of my kids are enrolled and so as a family we have more school money to play with, and less things we need to buy because a lot of my curriculum is non consumable and gets reused every year.
Some of the available field trips are closer to us, like the Sacramento Zoo. While there are a ton of other great trips all over California that would be nice if we could afford travel expenses. I have friends from other charter schools that have used this resource to take their family to Disneyland for a couple days!
It's going to be awesome figuring out how to make this new vendor bless our family next school year!
Explorer Field Trips, Field Trip Kits!
We can use instructional funds to purchase these kits (which include admission tickets and educational activity guides) and then use them whenever works for our family. There is even provision to allow my ticket as the parent to be paid for from student funds. And this is the perfect year for us because now all four of my kids are enrolled and so as a family we have more school money to play with, and less things we need to buy because a lot of my curriculum is non consumable and gets reused every year.
Some of the available field trips are closer to us, like the Sacramento Zoo. While there are a ton of other great trips all over California that would be nice if we could afford travel expenses. I have friends from other charter schools that have used this resource to take their family to Disneyland for a couple days!
It's going to be awesome figuring out how to make this new vendor bless our family next school year!
Awesome! Remember grandparent resources!
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