For seven hours and 46 minutes, 54 eighth grades are crammed on a bus heading from Liberty Township to a city on the Potomac River teeming with monuments, national government buildings, and history. After being cancelled in 2020, the eighth grade trip to D.C. is back on in middle schools across Lakota.
“[It was] simple. My seventh graders asked me if we could do it and I told them to find some teachers who are willing to organize it,” Liberty Junior School principal Linda Burwinkel told Spark. “They found the teachers who were willing and I supported them.”
Almost 200 eighth graders are attending the Washington DC trip, which takes place from May 7 to May 9, 2025. There will be 17 chaperones along with Burwinkel, and school nurse Shelly Drago. This means that there will be 10 to 12 students into each chaperone group, with four buses taken on the trip with about 50 students on each and 4 to 5 adults.
“We started planning the trip in March of 2024,” said Burwinkel. “We started with a committee to plan and organize this event, [and then we received] quotes from different travel agencies along with a tentative itinerary. Without teacher support, this couldn’t happen, but several teachers stepped up and said they were willing to go.”
Burwinkel presented the information to the Lakota School Board, as is customary to get board approval for any overnight field trip. She began by giving the board a letter along with a request form, a parent payment plan, and a sample itinerary. After receiving board approval in April 2024, they were good to move forward on planning the trip.
After that, there were interest meetings held for then seventh graders and a web page was created for information and payments along with advertisements for the trip being sent out in parent newsletters. Throughout the summer, families signed up for the trips, and meetings continued when students returned to school last August along with payments.
“There hasn’t been terribly much prep on the student’s ends for the trip,” eighth grade student Emmalin Zucker told Spark. “We’ve had to decide our groups to sleep with, walk with, and be on the bus with, and pick a leader that communicates with Mr. Heinrich, who worked to help bring back the DC trip and has planned a lot of it. Besides that, all we have really been asked to do is pick out food from a couple of restaurants and send in our t-shirt sizes.”
The cost for the trip is $795, which pays for all of the students’ meals, tour guides, tickets for all activities, transportation, as well as three t-shirts and one hoodie.
“The cost seems reasonable considering the fact that everything: like meals and lodging is included,” Emmalin’s mother, Kathryn Zucker told Spark.
Kathryn was happy to send her daughter on the trip especially because of the tradition behind it. “I decided to send my child on this trip because my child has not yet had the opportunity to go to Washington D.C. and I feel that it will be a good learning experience for her,” said Kathryn. “I am excited to see this tradition return. My son did not have the opportunity to go on the DC trip because he was in junior high when the COVID-19 pandemic hit.”
Emmalin is also looking forward to seeing a part of the country she has not visited before. “I hope to gain knowledge about certain monuments or sites in Washington DC. Having never been there myself, I think it should be a very interesting learning experience,” said Emmalin. “I don’t really know what to expect to see or do on the trip, so I guess I’m just looking forward to the trip as a whole!”
