I volunteer to chaperone the school trips all the time. I will gladly pay for private coach bus than go on an MCPS bus for free. MCPS buses are uncomfortable, do not have AC, smelly, noisy, with small windows and have narrow aisles. The exhaust and smoke from other vehicles on the roads wafts in all the time. I got a migraine after sitting in one.

Unless there is a question about affordability, I see no downside to it. In our school, there is also a school trip fund which you can contribute to so that students with financial difficulties do not have to pay for the school trips. I always contribute fo 1 additional kid.

Anonymous wrote:I counted 7 (but may have missed some) coach buses at Westland Middle for what the calendar says was a field trip. Maybe if it's a long trip and they need bathrooms, but this says they were going to the zoo which is all of 5 miles away at best. What a great use of financial resources!

4 miles, or 1 hour and 20 minutes. You're right, it would have been cheaper to walk, and they would have gotten some exercise, too.

(I'm not being serious.)

Another day, another thread with random people who think they know better than MCPS about something MCPS did. Seventh-graders should not go to the zoo, and they should not take charter buses on field trips. Got it.

Yeah, the zoo seems odd for a 7th grade field trip. Can you say what they did? Was it just looking at animals, or did they have presentations by the zoo staff on scientific stuff?

Aren't 7th graders a little old for the zoo?

It's my understanding that montgomery county yellow buses cannot leave the county. I guess it has to do with insurance costs.

Anonymous wrote:I counted 7 (but may have missed some) coach buses at Westland Middle for what the calendar says was a field trip. Maybe if it's a long trip and they need bathrooms, but this says they were going to the zoo which is all of 5 miles away at best. What a great use of financial resources!

Why do you say that? Maybe the coach buses were cheaper.

The time window for using school busses is quite narrow. Only maybe 4 hours from about 10-2 I think, in order to give them time to finish the morning runs, and get back for afternoon runs. For any drive that's an hour+ or an event that occurs outside that time frame, it's really not worth it to use school busses.

This is an issue for you? Back in the 90s we took these coach buses to sporting events and field trips. Not unusual or a new thing.

You know that parents pay for this, not the school.

The field trip was the entire 7th grade to the zoo. The cost was $13 per student, checks payable to Westland.

I suspect almost the full cost was paid by the parent paid fees.

Yellow school buses aren't available because they need to do the elementary school run after the MS, and the high school before the MS in the afternoon.

I used to arrange the buses for school trips at a small private school. The big busses seat about 20 more kids than the regular busses. One year, our numbers were such that we needed 1 big bus or 2 school busses for most trips. The big bus was cheaper, so for an entire year the kids rode in style. Then, the next year we enrolled a few more kids and were at the point where we needed 2 either way. The kids were not happy to go back to school busses.

Anyway, I'm just saying that I wouldn't assume there wasn't a good reason.

Depends on the timing of the trip--the school buses are needed for their regular morning and afternoon rounds.

As opposed to... What other option? Yellow school buses aren't free either, and there's certain contract restrictions on their use. Or maybe they were all in use elsewhere.

I counted 7 (but may have missed some) coach buses at Westland Middle for what the calendar says was a field trip. Maybe if it's a long trip and they need bathrooms, but this says they were going to the zoo which is all of 5 miles away at best. What a great use of financial resources!