A San Benito High School teacher is coordinating an international trip for students—separate from the campus that employs her—after trustees put a stop to sponsoring overseas programs due to liability concerns.
Trustees chose not to sponsor the trips to avoid complications that come with determining who has responsibility and liability for students when they are out of the country, explained Superintendent John Perales in a conversation with the Free Lance last week.
“A perfect example is many countries have different drinking ages. We as a school do not want to manage that. So parents and students go on these trips. If a parent is okay with their student drinking, given the legal drinking age in that country, so be it,” the superintendent said. “We don’t want to have to fight that battle.”
The 12-day trip organized through a touring company by Andrea Walton, a San Benito High School history teacher, will have students from across San Benito County—ages 14 to 23—traipsing through some of Europe’s finest cities including London, Paris, Barcelona and Madrid.
The $3,756 price tag includes airfare, transportation, sightseeing tours, daily breakfast and dinner, and a full-time multilingual tour director, according to an email from Walton.
“That will be one heck of a wonderful trip,” said Heidi Henderson, a San Benito High School parent who sent her four children on similar tours of Spain.
Henderson didn’t know the reasons the district stopped sponsoring international trips, she said. The 2014 educational trip to Scotland and England was school sponsored, but the 2015 Spain tour was not school board approved, Walton explained in an email to the Free Lance.
“I just know they said ‘no’ and it’s just kind of bewildering to me because they’re wonderful opportunities for the kids,” Henderson said. “I just feel it’s one more thing we’re yanking from kids in this area.”
Principal Todd Dearden said the decision was made before his arrival at San Benito High School.
“That’s a board decision and our board decided to not sponsor international trips,” he said.
Perales called the trips “wonderful experiences” and said his own son will be participating in overseas programs. An international trip through Europe was wildly popular with students in the Gilroy Unified School District—where Perales was formerly a principal—but is not sponsored by the schools, he said. For those trips, teachers announced the opportunities once through the school bulletin and website, the superintendent said. Teachers arranged organizational meetings and created flyers without using site resources, Perales explained.
Henderson praised the international trips as eye opening.
“You have this vision of what you think the world is like and you go out there and it’s totally different for most people,” the parent said.
Walton got her own exposure to the international world at an early age and found that travel was influential in making her who she is today, she explained. Her father worked for an airline company so she and her mother did a lot of traveling when she was young, visiting communist nations and seeing places such as Venezuela, Egypt and the Caribbean.
“I really found it was instrumental in making me who I am,” the teacher said.
Walton’s father couldn’t always go on the trips so she was her mother’s “real traveling partner,” she said.
“She took me through to East Berlin and did some very brave things for someone that was living through the Cold War,” the teacher said.
Walton is hoping to awaken the traveling bug in some younger students, just as her mother did for her years ago.
It’s not just higher-income students that go, the teacher explained. The cost of the program can be broken down into payments of $200 a month with no interest, Walton said. Students will also have the chance to participate in group fundraisers. Parents can tag along for $4,236.
For more information, check out the tour group’s website: explorica.com/Walton-6031 or call Walton at (408) 781-6231.
