Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "If the Administration Was Doing Their Job....":
The POB 8th grade Graduation trip to Ellis Island today was horrible! Why bother? The buses left 1/2 late. It was my impression (and the kids thought so too )that the children were actually supposed to go up into the Statue of Liberty and learn something. I heard that someone bought the wrong tickets and the kids actually just walked around the Lady and waved. Hats Off to the person who organized this trip. I heard it was the teachers. Oh was it the teachers who got the big raises this year? It was my impression as a parent that the trips were supposed to be for Educational purposes and not fun! I think the BOE needs to review this policy because the only thing educational about this trip today was that my kid came home with a bad sunburn from walking and sitting around outside for 2 hours..doing nothing. There was NO tour of Ellis Island by anyone. Most of the kids did not even know they could go inside the building on Ellis Island. So much for the educational reason and the point of the trip......
What was the point anyway? Can someone clarify this? Maybe when you take the fun away, this is what you get. The Merrick school district took the graduating 8th graders to Citi-Field this year.
Board of Ed and Administrators: Time to regroup and re-think the Field trip policy in the POB schools.....
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it's fine to have a complaint about something that went wrong, thats understandable. I happen to know that the teacher who organized this trip put a lot of planning and effort into this trip. sometimes things don't work out exactly as planned. that being said why would you choose to put, and I quote, "i heard it was one of the teachers. Oh was it one of the teachers who got big raises this year" what does that have to do with anything? do you think that this teacher did this for spite? could it be that a simple mistake was made? come on lets drop the hate.
ReplyDeleteI don't think the complaint was coming from a position of spite, more astonishment. If this was an executive planning a trip to wow and woo a client and it had gone so badly, he/she would probably have lost the client and his job as well.
ReplyDeleteSounds like an awful trip--glad my kids are not in 8th grade. SOunds like someone has to review the trips for the district....board of ed, anyone want to comment?
ReplyDeleteThis is Not Hate or Spite.Not directed at one teacher. Just a Fact! Was it your child who was on this horrible trip? NO....Do you pay my huge tax bill? No....I expect more for my money.. This was supposed to be a memorable thing for our child's last year in the school. I do not care about how much planning went into this..Obviously Not enough.....Otherwise our kids would be smiling now and not complaining.
ReplyDeleteMy point is ..This should have been a great thing for our kids and their impression in one word: BORING!
For what these teachers are getting paid a year? sounds like we have some teachers who spend too much time looking at their huge paychecks and not concentrating on what they are getting Overcompensated to do. Maybe they are focusing more on the contract negotiations that start in july for the next teacher contract.
ReplyDeleteIf the teachers bought the wrong tickets then how much were the original tickets?
ReplyDeletewere the wrong tickets cheaper and someone made a profit? this is not a simple mistake it is a dumb mistake and just another example of our overcompensated teachers who do not justify their compensation. No excuses at the expense of our children.
This feel trip gets even better with the more information I receive. The children also went to ellis island . What did they do? a good number of the kids just walked around the island and did not go in beacuse they were not told by the teachers or directed to go inside to maybe LEARN something interesting. Hello BOE maybe you should look into this as to why these oblivious teachers had no clue about why and where the children were going. What a waste of our tax dollars on this trip.
ReplyDeleteFor someone to put in their post that "I heard it was one of the teachers" is certainly a statement that is meant to be divisive, otherwise why say it? sometimes planed out events don't work out as planned. Why can't it be left at that?
ReplyDeleteAnother constructive, thoughtful, reasonable post.
ReplyDeleteI doubt he or she has many positive things to say about anyone or anything, except perhaps for other complainers who reinforce her prejudiced, cynical views
drop the hate but who is taking responsibility?
ReplyDeleteWhy bother going if the point is to go inside? My kid was very disappointed. He was looking forward to this. Now I have to take him myself. Give me my money back so I can take him.
ReplyDeletethe point about it being"left at that"
ReplyDeletewhen the teachers demanded more money why can't the teachers salaries "be left at that" the same salary. They are being paid to be "professional" and we should expect nothing less. This is not devisive , it is Acoountability that we are talking about
The point is :
ReplyDeleteWith the amount of money I pay to live here , it should have "Gone as Planned" No Excuses...What a waste of time and money..Who is responsible for this??????Not a cynical view Just the plain Facts! Again I ask to the people who are defending the teachers on this trip and provided no educational direction:Was you kid on this trip? NO it was not. Parents should complain about this.
So everything from here on in will be the blame of the teachers I suppose. EVERYTHING does not come down to teacher's salaries and EVERYTHING should not be a complaint. It's the BOE's policy to plan educational trips and not trips for fun not the teacher's policy. Maybe parent's should take over this task since they can clearly do a better job.
ReplyDeleteMissing the point. What actually happened here ? Did someone buy the wrong tickets or was someone taking shotcuts to save money??
ReplyDeleteWhy did the chaperones go their own way on the Island's and leave the kids to wander the island unsupervised?
VERY DISTURBING!
Going through the motions and missing the mark. Excuses and no accountability. Another day in the Plainview-Old Bethpage School District.
ReplyDeleteWhy does it seem like these "little mistakes" are happening more and more often? I don't think any of it is malicious. It's a lack of procedure or lack of people that should care that don't. Who reviewed the itinerary? And that goes for everything in this district. NOBODY checks what's going on.
ReplyDeleteAs far as the suggestion that parents plan the trip because they do a better job. How about this :you give me a teachers salary and I will plan the best trip ever that an entry level employee of a corporation could do. In return you can pay my school tax bill.
ReplyDeleteHere's some ideas for next year's 8th grade trip -
ReplyDelete1. Stand in front of the Empire State Building and look up
2. Sit on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
3. Drive by the Intrepid
4. Take a subway through Time Square
Why wasn't there a tour guide arranged for this trip? What's the point of taking kids to Ellis Island and not have someone there talk to them?
ReplyDeleteThese trips sound educational on paper - Ellis Island - how can that be any other than educational? - but no one is following up to see what they actually accomplish in terms of education. This doesn't mean give the kids a test or make them write about it after they come back. The field trip should be planned so it is meaningful when it happens. Instead it seems that there is an assumption just by bringing kids someplace that something educational is bound to rub off. Are the Project Challenge trips this disorganized? I doubt it.
How could the kids not know to go into the building on Ellis Island? If they weren't curious about it this is the fault of the adults in charge since they should have directed the kids to go inside.
Just like a guided tour across country or in Europe, the bus rides are times when the kids can be told about what they're doing or seeing. I've been on class trips and the bus rides - which can be a decent amount of time back and forth - are chaos. It doesn't need to be for the entire ride but at least there should be some effort to teach the kids about where they are going, let them know what they will be doing, when you have them all together and they are a captive audience sitting on a bus. Instead it's just alot of free time during a school day when instruction should be going on.
They could have set up a scavenger hunt - have the kids look for and take pictures of certain things.
It seems like no effort was made to make this trip educational and this was only compounded by the mistake at the Statue of Liberty with the wrong tickets being purchased which didn't allow the kids to go into the Statue of Liberty.
Trips get approved because they SOUND educational. Trips should BE educational. Being and sounding are two different things.
This whole trip is such folly; Parents and students insist there be an end of year trip for kids, "moving up", the board says, it must be educational. The teachers come up with a subject that can veiled as "educational". Everyone is happy until the trip disintegrates; the kids didn't have fun, (parents and students real goal) the trip isn't educational, ( the teacher and board are blamed) and the sham is revealed, ( everyone eats crow). It would probably be better if we just went back to the fun end of year trips and be honest about it.
ReplyDeleteField trips should have to have a guided tour component otherwise they shouldn't be allowed.
ReplyDeleteAn educational trip doesn't mean that it isn't fun. Something well-planned and organized can be both.
ReplyDeleteYou can't blame the Board for approving a trip to Ellis Island or the Statue of Liberty. It's not like they said it was OK to take the kids to Great Adventure or Splish Splash. They assume certain things are going to happen before, during and after the trip that make it educational.
Someone has to be accountable. The current system doesn't seem to do that so some procedure needs to happen that avoids this problem in the future.
Whoever is in charge of setting up the trip should submit a plan of how the trip is going to be organized, what will be learned and how this will happen (at the place itself with a tour guide or with the teachers giving a guided tour, stuff going on in the classroom before the trip and follow up after the trip). This should be reviewed on a building level to make sure that the trip is actually doing something worthwhile even before the trip gets submitted to be approved by the Board. Everyone knows what to expect and there is an opportunity for constructive feedback and suggestions to make the trip better before it happens.
I think the parents that bitch and moan should be taken to Ellis Island and returned to the countries from where their descendants came from.
ReplyDeleteNext year let the parents decide where they should go....Roosevelt field for some shopping perhaps?
I think the teacher that keeps adding to this post should be taken to Ellis Island and returned to just doing your job RIGHT.The people who organized this trip would have been fired in Corporate America. The prima-donna teachers in this district just continue to show their true colors! This is another example.
ReplyDeleteWho is going to fess up and say what really happened on this ?
ReplyDeleteSeems like another case of Another case of Incompetence and Excuses!
How about the spoiled greedy teachers go out and get a job in the REAL corporate world where they can not bully their employers like they do here . The employers being the BOE,residents,,parents,and children. Just try to make 100,000 a year and screw up a field trip any entry level employee could put together. What would happen ? they would be fired. As far as a shopping trip to Roosevelt Field, alot of parents do not go there anymore because of the huge tax bill they are stuck with to pay our much spoiled and clueless teachers . I bet the teachers can still drive their Lexus' to the mall to shop. As far as sending parents back to their countries to which they came from ; that sounds to me like ethnic predjudice or racist. I do not know where you came from . Regardless of my heritage, I am born and bred AMERICAN and suggesting us to go back to our countries when we are in them just shows your high level of ignorance
ReplyDeleteThe comment from June 25th at 1:55PM should be deleted from this thread. Whoever wrote it is welcome to start his/her own blog. Although I have had nothing to do with this particular discussion as my kids are in a different building so I know nothing of the trip, racism is inexcusable. This isn't the forum for it.
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't suggest anyone be offended by it. It was probably written by a child.
Maybe our school district SHOULD take kids to the mall. They can let them walk around and hang out and then claim that the trip was teaching them economics and finance. It's no different from what they did on Ellis Island if they say the trip was teaching them social studies when the kids didn't even go in the building. I agree with the other posts - get a tour guide or its a waste as far as learning goes.
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like someone wasn't thorough enough in planning this field trip. If it was only one teacher planning it, that's an immediate red flag. It should have been a group effort. As far as the staff chaperones are concerned, the liability for the trip was on everyone's shoulders so everyone is responsible. That being said, all field trips must be approved by the principal and the upper level administration. Responsibility rests on their shoulders as well.
ReplyDeleteAll this being said, I disagree that the board is to blame on this one. Their approval comes from the administration's recommendation. The administration should have been more thorough.
Also, holding the entire staff of Plainview teachers, district wide, responsible for this is, in my opinion, an overreaction. Yes, some incompetence and/or lack of appropriate leadership (disturbing as it all was) are evident but an educator who had nothing to do with the trip or doesn't even work in the same building should not be taken to task on this.
In all honesty, I am not a fan of school field trips. Supervision within the school building is not the same as it is anywhere else. Students don't have the same focus outside of the classroom so there's a different disciplinary dynamic. The chaperones have to focus more on logistics and safety than anything else so quite frankly, my kids will get more out of a destination when they go with me rather than with the school.
The movie The Karate Kid takes place in China and there are a lot of scenes that take place in school. One scene is a school trip to the Forbidden City. The kids are walking with a guide who is explaining the area to them. It is orderly and the kids are learning while being someplace other than a classroom.
ReplyDeleteLearning is better when you are seeing something for real instead of in a textbook. Trips need to be planned with the intent of making the trip educationally meaningful. At it takes is having someone talk to the kids about where you're going.
End of year trips are still celebrations. No one is buying into them being educational.
I have to agree with the June 28 at 6:58pm referencing the Karate Kid.
ReplyDeleteIt is sad that this trip went the way it did.My son was on this trip-had to force him to go-only to have it blow up in my face.
The same kind of thing happened when my son went on the 4th grade trip to Philadelphia. What a waste of money and time. Not only didn't they learn anything, they didn't get to see anything either.
Trips can be fun and educational if the time, effort and care is put into them.
In theory (or in the movies), field trips have tremendous educational benefits above and beyond those found in textbooks. It's been my experience as both a parent and a teacher, who's chaperoned many trips over the years, that these trips are not always as educational as they should be, especially when it's an entire grade level going together.
ReplyDeleteAs far as end of the year trips go, I agree that they are more celebratory than anything else. To be honest, there's really nothing wrong with that. Long after the kids forget how exactly they learned how to diagram sentences or figure out lowest common denominator, they might remember the experience of playing a students against teachers frisbee game at the end of year picnic or how Mrs. X screamed so much on the roller coaster they all managed to get her on against her initial wishes. It's worth something.
Well said "June 29 7:13pm"
ReplyDelete