Teen travel with school group to Paris

[Anonymous]

The lessons she'll learn seeing the world are 100x more valuable to her long term education than staying at home in DC with her anxious helicopter parents.

[Anonymous]

I would. But I would rather plan a trip for the family to Paris, and often can on nearly the same budget.

[Anonymous]

I'd go to Paris as a family. Not sure I'd send a 7th grader on one of those school trips. But less because of terrorist-attack type safety concerns than because I think those trips are often poorly supervised and kids spend too much time watching TV or playing on their phones on a bus.

[Anonymous]

My child did one. It gave her a lot of confidence. She had traveled a lot prior to the trip.

The big downside was the cost-- 3 of us probably could have gone for the amount of 1 person on the trip (since the paying students subsidize the chaperones etc.).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Would you allow your 7/8th grader to go to Paris France with a school group trip with the climate in the world right now. I am worried about the terrorism that keeps occurring around the world. Thoughts on this? Why yeah or nay. I was all for it a year ago, but now I am a bit unsure. I also don't know that the school has a good emergency plan.

Yay. Your child is safer - statistically - in Paris than here in the US.

[Anonymous]

No way. Just no. Way too young. No. Same story as above. 8th grade trip? Time of my life. Have no recollection of the point of the trip nor where we went but I bought a Swatch Watch and had a great time in Jan's boyfriends lap. Yeah. Cried a river when I got home. Nope. Just nope.

[Anonymous]

In a way I'd argue that a middle school trip to Paris (or any other destination) is safer than a high school trip. Kids are less likely to do "naughty" things and teachers are more likely to provide greater oversight and odds are there are also parents involved with the trip. That's my assumption.

I went on a high school trip to Italy. Plenty of drinking and smoking, and smoking in front of the teachers too (one of the teachers smoked). We even went to a nightclub in Rome with the teachers (a dull nightclub but we drank booze while the teachers hid in another room). Private school, FYI. A Quaker private school too ( ) This was in the 1990s and it was just a different time. Students regularly smoked on the overseas trips, including the three week long language exchanges with French and Spanish schools. Looking back, I'm sure the faculty had the attitude that the kids would be sneaking cigarettes anyway, don't ruin the trip by making a huge fuss, let the parents deal with it and it's just cigarettes and not drugs, which is a logical attitude to have in a way at a time when smoking was much more common among teens.

I also remember being somewhat bored/confined by the trip because I'd already travelled to Italy multiple times with my parents and found the whole tour bus, long waits, set meals dreary (we had the exact same spaghetti and tomato sauce every day) and unexciting.