Field Trip Policy Formalizes Chaperone Guidelines

Since the shocking on a field trip to back in March, the 's field trip policy has been scrutinized. At Wednesday night’s board meeting, the trustees approved the teacher adn chaperone guidelines after combing through some phrases word by word to highlight the full responsibility of chaperoning a field trip.

The guidelines maintained the 10:1 student to teacher/chaperone ratio for daytime field trips. For overnight trips or field trips involving water, the ratio will tighten to 7:1.

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“There are more steps than there have ever been before,” Trustee Maria Diaz-Slocum said of the new guidelines.

The guidelines were drafted by Deputy Superintendent John Baker, McKinley Institute of Technology Assistant Principal Jennifer Knopf, Redwood City Teachers Association President Bret Baird and former Selby Lane principal Carolyn Williams.

In each section of the guidelines, the board and administration wanted every line clearly delineating full responsibility on the teacher or parent to monitor each student.

“Keeping track of each and every student is the number one priority of field trip day,” the teacher policy states.

Trustee Dennis McBride wanted to add the clause “and are safe” to the end of the sentence, “you will supervise a small group of students, helping them learn and making sure they behave well.”

Trustee Hilary Paulson said that the guidelines should highlight the serious responsibility of chaperoning a field trip, as she said she had seen some parents taking day trips to the city for lunch when they should have been watching the students.

The word “supervised” was even broken down and defined to not literally mean that students would be visible to chaperones every second of every minute.

The line, “If you can’t see the students, you are not supervising them” was stricken from the guidelines, per President Alisa MacAvoy’s request.

“We need to know how to provide safety and also be realistic about making these trips possible,” MacAvoy said.

Trustee Shelly Masur added, “You can create a level of angst by making the level of restriction too great. We shouldn’t discourage people from being chaperones by making them feel overwhelmed.”

She provided her own personal example of the difficulty of mandating car checks for each field trip. With chaperones’ tight schedules, she found that getting a car check on her own time was nearly impossible and the school was not able to proceed with the field trip due to lack of chaperones.

But other trustees suggested that difficulty was a school site inefficiency issue. Car checks could be as simple as testing brakes, headlights and turn signals by other chaperones.