Brownsville Teacher Crowdsourcing $34K Class Trip To Spain

BROWNSVILLE, BROOKLYN — The students who teacher Bijoun Eric Jordan wants to take to Spain have never crossed the Atlantic Ocean and don't have the money to get overseas on their own. He's doing what he can, though, to make sure these kids realize what he learned long ago.

“There’s this notion that we don’t belong,” he explained to Patch. “I want to give my students that sense I got from traveling — that the planet belongs to me.”

To drive home that message, Jordan — an English teacher at Frederick Douglass Academy VII — is working to raise $34,000 through a GoFundMe campaign to help 12 students see and soak in the culture, history and landscapes of the Spanish coastal gem of Barcelona and the country's stately capital of Madrid.

The benefits can be life-changing. Not only do his students face daunting financial challenges in Brownsville — one student has been homeless, another faced eviction — they also have had little or no first-hand exposure to the possibilities outside their neighborhood.

“I want to expose my students to the world, to people who don’t look like them, so they can discover they have commonalities,” Jordan said.

He launched his fundraising campaign in December with the help of his students, the Frederick Douglass Academy staff, and any friends he could corral. The students filmed a mini-promo to publicize their campaign, the staff took collections at their local churches, and Jordan’s friends have contributed what they can spare.

“A friend of mine made a thousand-dollar donation,” Jordan said. “I was speechless, I was stunned. I contacted that friend and was like, why?”

She told Jordan what many of his donors would tell him, that travel changed her life and it was important to give that chance to someone else. In just four months, more than 700 people have donated a total of almost $26,000 — and while some are making large donations — mostly it’s “tens and twenties,” Jordan said.

The students aren't getting a totally free ride. Each student is required to contribute $605 to the cost of their trip, so they are raising money, too. One young woman, whom Jordan declined to name but described as, “to use an SAT vocab word, ebullient, ” has been working after school at a BAM concession stand. Another student has been working for a law firm.

Jordan is proud of his students — they’re creative, smart, hard-working — and he believes it is his job to expand their perspectives.

The eight-day tour of Spain — organized by EF Educational Travel and promoted on social media by Black Travel Movement — will be spent in two of the world's greatest cities. Students will be exposed to the spectacular art and architecture of Barcelona along with the grand plazas, elegant boulevards and the virtual museum of outdoor sculpture in Madrid.

But the moment Jordan is looking forward to most is the moment his 12 students first set foot in a foreign country on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, when he sees they recognize that the world is theirs.

“That’s when I’m going to look for that confirmation,” he said. “I just want to see their faces when they step off the plane.”

Image via Bijoun Eric Jordan.