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Sunday, May 19, 2013

By Janet Hefler
Published: February 26, 2009

Martha's Vineyard Public Schools (MVPS) superintendent James Weiss presented a draft student travel policy to the All-Island School Advisory Council meeting on February 5, as a starting point for creating a standardized policy for schools Island-wide, including Martha's Vineyard Regional High School (MVRHS).

"As we've been moving forward, one of the things I've tried to do as consistently as possible is to promulgate policies for all of Martha's Vineyard's schools, because having different policies or no policies is just driving me crazy," Mr. Weiss explained in a phone call last week. "I talked with the elementary school principals, and they did not have student travel policies, so I took the high school policy as the starting point, and began to draft a policy that would be for all of Martha's Vineyard's public schools."

The revised policy also is a first step towards clarifying and restructuring the regional high school's student travel policy, which recently came under fire from several teachers in an article in The High School View in the February 5 Martha's Vineyard Times.

"Teachers who once felt that the school would stand behind them should a problem occur now believe that language in the current policy would place virtually all liability on them," the article stated.

Mr. Weiss said, however, that the travel policy is the same as it's been since its adoption in 2007. "It's not a change at all - it's just that people don't necessarily understand what they're doing," he said.

Sponsored or sanctioned?

The high school's current student travel policy classifies trips by two types, school-sponsored and school-sanctioned. A school-sponsored trip is one connected to curriculum, open to all students in a group, with fundraising done and managed in the school's name by the school, Mr. Weiss said. "And we have some obligations to the community when it's a school-sponsored activity," he added. "We have to make sure that it really is available to anybody in that group: if it's the senior class that's going, it's got to be available to the entire senior class."

"These are not easy issues to deal with, and I don't know the answers at this point - and I think that's the part that some people miss," Mr. Weiss said. "They thought we were changing policy, and we're not. The high school's policy is in place, and we're going through a process of looking at what we want to see happen, and trying to build a policy that will allow that to take place."

A matter of liability

If a travel policy was in place for elementary schools, an eighth grade trip to Washington, D.C., and day trips to the Boston Science Museum would be considered school-sponsored trips, for example.

"The school owns the liability for those - very clearly," Mr. Weiss said. "It's just like a day in school. And as long as the teacher and other chaperones are acting within their job description, they don't have any personal liability - the school has the liability."

Currently the high school classifies three field trips as school-sponsored, including a trip to Ireland for students in social studies department chairman Elaine Weintraub's Irish history and culture classes, an England exchange trip, and a trip to Washington, D.C., for students participating in the Close-Up Program, according to Mr. Weiss. "The others are what we call school-sanctioned - we know they exist, but we don't have control of them," he said. "One way to look at this is the only trips we're going to be involved with are school-sponsored trips, because we don't have control of the others."

Mr. Weiss said that last year, for example, a high school teacher took a small group of students to Germany on his own. "We don't have any liability for that - it wasn't a school-sponsored activity," he said. "The only liability is the individual liability of the teacher and the students. Now, many people think, however, that a teacher was involved; therefore, it was a school trip. But it wasn't. And that's the kind of differentiation we're trying to make clear."

Under the high school's travel policy criteria, trips to Europe taken by the high school's Minnesingers choral group also fall into question. "It not clear to me whether those are school-sponsored activities or not, because the trips really are not a school activity - it's the parent group that runs those trips, not the school," Mr. Weiss pointed out. "And I'm not sure whether it should go that way. We need to look at these things and make sure we're clear to people, because to the average citizen on the street, there probably isn't all that much differentiation."

"From the chair I sit in, if students are going on trips anywhere, we need to have some authority and some control over them if we're going to have the liability," Mr. Weiss added. "And there are cases where that is not clear, and that's all we're trying to do, is to make it clear to everyone who's in charge about how things have to operate, who handles the money, who is responsible for making the decisions, and lay that out very clearly."

Time and money

The February 5 High School View article also said that many Martha's Vineyard Regional High School teachers were concerned by the fact that school officials require them to use their personal days for any school days used when taking school-sanctioned trips.

"That's right - they're not school activities; therefore, it's not something we would allow them to take a professional day for," Mr. Weiss said. "And again, that's not a new change in policy."

Collecting and managing money for field trips has been another source of contention. At the February 9 regional high school committee meeting, Martha's Vineyard Regional High School principal Stephen Nixon said that in the past, teachers collected money from students for field trips and gave it to the school bookkeeper, who maintained a travel account with all the trip funds lumped together.

At some point, however, there was a question of whether one teacher took more money from the fund than he or she put in. Consequently, the school's auditing firm cited the practice as something that should be changed, as a matter of better accountability.

Mr. Nixon said he planned to set up activity accounts for each school department, so that if a trip costs more than planned, the department will be responsible.

Packing the policy up

In addition to presenting the draft student travel policy at the Island-wide SAC meeting, Mr. Weiss gave copies of it to the administrative cabinet, which includes all of the school principals and central office administrators. He also asked for opinions from the advisory council for the teachers' union, which includes the Martha's Vineyard Educator's Association and the Martha's Vineyard Regional Teachers and Educators Association.

With the input he received from Island educators, Mr. Weiss said he plans to move forward over the next month or two to finalize the student travel policy and bring it before the All-Island School Committee.

"And the idea would be, do we have two kinds, school-sponsored and school-sanctioned?" Mr. Weiss said. "What's the difference, what's the liability, who gets to go, who decides what, chaperone policies and guidelines, all that kind of stuff - and we're trying to put it all in one place."