Is It Normal For Schools To Offer International Cross-Continent Trips For Students?
I was folding grass-stained soccer laundry after practice last week when my 10th grader, Leo, dropped his backpack on the kitchen table and pulled out a crumpled neon blue flier. “Mom, look. History club is doing a 12-day trip to Vietnam and Cambodia next spring. Can I apply?” I paused mid-sock fold and stared at the photo of rice paddies on the front, then at the small print noting two countries, 12 days, halfway across the world. When I was Leo’s age, the biggest school trip we took was a three-day camping trip an hour outside of town. The first thing I did that night was type a question into my phone search bar, then ping our 10th grade parent group chat: Is this normal?
Replies popped up within minutes. One mom wrote that her daughter’s middle school is already planning a 10-day trip to Costa Rica for next year, and she’d assumed that sort of thing only happened at fancy private boarding schools. A dad replied that his older kid’s public high school did a 10-day trip to Portugal two years ago, so this wasn’t a surprise to him. None of us could remember our own public schools offering anything close to intercontinental travel when we were kids, so even if it was happening all around us, it still felt weird and out of place.
I brought the flier to Leo’s history teacher, Ms. Lopez, at parent-teacher conferences a few days later to get the full story. She leaned back in her chair, laughed a little, and said that 15 years ago when she started teaching at our school, she’d never have imagined having this conversation. Back then, international trips were reserved for honor society kids at elite private schools, if they happened at all. Now, our public high school offers one intercontinental trip every other year, rotating between regions, and seven out of 10 high schools in our area do the same. The shift started, she said, when schools moved toward more hands-on, project-based learning, and educational tour companies started building lower-cost itineraries that tie directly to classroom curricula, instead of just generic tourist trips. So to answer the question: yes, this is becoming normal now, even in public school systems.
That said, normal doesn’t mean it’s always good, or right for every family. I asked her what parents should look for to tell if a trip is a legitimate educational opportunity, or just a fancy vacation the school is pushing to get extra revenue. She walked me through the concrete questions to ask, things I hadn’t thought to check on my own.
First, ask how the school handles cost and access. The worst case, she said, is a trip that only a handful of wealthy kids can afford, that leaves everyone else feeling left out. At our school, all group fundraising (like the bake sales and car washes the kids plan) goes into a shared pool, not individual accounts for each kid. Forty percent of the students signed up for the Vietnam trip got at least partial coverage from that pool, plus school subsidies for low-income families. If a school only lets kids keep their own individual fundraising profits, that’s a red flag—kids whose parents can’t afford to buy 10 boxes of wrapping paper from their kid will never get enough to go.
Second, ask for a full day-by-day itinerary, and count how much time is spent on educational activities tied to class work, versus sightseeing or leisure. The Vietnam trip Leo is looking at has seven full days of scheduled activities that tie directly to our school’s 10th grade history unit on the Vietnam War: working with a local youth group on a community heritage project, interviewing local historians, visiting historical sites with guides who talk about the conflict from multiple perspectives. Only one and a half days are set aside for free time to explore and eat local food. If an itinerary is all shopping and beach days and no structured learning, it’s just a school-sponsored vacation, not an educational trip.
Third, ask about chaperone ratios and safety protocols. Our trip has one chaperone for every eight students, and all chaperones are full-time school staff who’ve completed international emergency response training, not just parent volunteers who get a discounted spot to come along. That’s a good baseline to expect.
I also talked to a mom whose younger son couldn’t afford the school’s trip to Peru last year, after her older son went two years prior. She told me she didn’t just tell him no—she emailed the trip coordinator and asked if there was a way for him to participate from home. The school set him up with a student pen pal at the Peruvian community center the group was working with, he joined the group’s daily check-ins over Zoom, and he did a parallel research project on Andean textile traditions that he presented at the school’s global studies fair right alongside the kids who traveled. It wasn’t the same as going, but it meant he didn’t feel left out of the whole experience. That’s a concrete ask any parent can make if cost or health or other issues keep your kid from going.
I’m still on the fence about letting Leo go. We’ve got eight months to fundraise, and he’s already mapped out a car wash for next month with two other kids going on the trip. I worry about him being 8,000 miles away for 12 days, and even with the subsidy, the cost is still a stretch for our family. But when I asked if this sort of thing is normal, the answer I got is that yes, it’s becoming more common every year, in both public and private schools. Normal doesn’t mean you have to say yes, though. It’s okay to ask all the hard questions, it’s okay to opt out if it doesn’t work for your family, and it’s okay to push the school to make space for kids who can’t travel. Right now, Leo has a map of Vietnam taped to his bedroom wall, with little red dots marking all the places he wants to see. We’ll see how it goes.
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