PRO: Board should shorten length of school-sponsored trips

By Madeleine Powell

Arts editor

At the April 18 Manhattan Beach Unified School District Board of Trustees meeting, the board discussed the newly proposed changes to the MBUSD school-sponsored trip policy that would limit extracurricular school-sponsored trips that could potentially cause absences. The recommendations for Board Policy 6153 would be beneficial because the decrease in student absences would ultimately lead to a decrease in student stress.

According to MBUSD meeting record from MBUSD BP 6153 adopted on Sept. 5, 2007, “school-sponsored trips are an important component of a student’s development and supplement and enrich the classroom learning experience.” These school trips may be taken in connection with fields of study or extracurricular activities of the district, according to the website.

During the most recent meeting, the Board of Trustees proposed that a limit be added to the policy on the number of days students are allowed to miss due to school-sponsored trips.The limit translates to five percent of the school year and would allow for students to miss the equivalent of nearly two weeks of school. While it is a restriction, the limit is still flexible enough to accomodate a variety of student activities, and would allow students to decide which trips are worth the missed classtime.

From Nov. 13 to March 5, there was a total of 2,880 periods missed, or 2,640 hours of instructional time due to non-event days during 18 overnight school-sponsored trips. The large number of absences in such a short period of time causes students to miss key instructional time that often cannot be made up. Re-examining and potentially shortening aspects of overnight trips that do not pertain to the trip’s purpose would help reduce these excessive absences and allow students to miss fewer hours of instructional time.

The board also proposed that school-sponsored trips be approved 30 days in advance, with the exception of unforeseen overnight trips such as California Interscholastic Federation competitions. Approval will only be granted during the first meetings in August, November, February and June, and no funds from students attending the trip may be deposited before the trip has been approved by the board.

Rather than having students face potential backlash from teachers when asking for permission after the student has paid for a trip, the approval process will allow for teachers to know about the trips far in advance so both teachers and students can plan accordingly to the given schedule.

While the proposed limit of nine school days may be seen as limiting enriching experiences unique to locations travelled on the trips, there is an excessively high amount of absences that non-event days cause; time in the classroom could be seen as a more valuable use of student time.

The recommendations proposed by MBUSD in BP 6153 are beneficial to students, as well as teachers, by decreasing their overall amount of absences. Increased time in the classroom and decreased absences due to school trips will lead to a reduction in student stress as a whole, ultimately helping students with their classwork and coping with stress that may be caused by these trips.