My Kid’s School Offers International Trips Across Continents: Is This Normal, and What Should I Know?
I was waiting in the middle school car line last month, sipping lukewarm coffee I’d brewed at 6 a.m. and forgotten about, when my 7th grader came bounding across the parking lot clutching a crumpled neon green flyer. “Mom, look,” he said, climbing into the backseat and shoving the paper in my face. “Mr. Henderson is taking a group to Costa Rica next spring for 10 days, and they also have a trip to Japan for 8th grade and a service trip to Morocco next year for high school. Can I sign up?”
I blinked as I pulled out of the parking lot, and my first thought was: Wait, is this normal? When I was in middle school, the only international trip our school offered was an optional exchange to Canada for seniors, and only three kids went. This wasn’t that. This was annual trips to three different continents, starting as early as 7th grade.
We got home, I unpacked his backpack, he dumped a half-eaten cheese stick on the counter, and pulled up the trip page on the school website while he ate peanut butter crackers. Sure enough, there was a whole tab on the parent portal labeled “Global Learning Trips,” with itineraries, photo galleries from past trips, and open enrollment links. I texted three of my parent group chats to ask if anyone else dealt with this. One mom whose kid goes to a public high school 20 minutes away said her school offers two international trips a year, too. Another, at a different local middle school, said she’d never heard of anything like that, and thought it sounded crazy expensive.
I RSVP’d to the parent info night the school was holding that week, just to get more context. It was in the school cafeteria, folding tables pushed against the wall, coffee that tasted like dish soap, about 20 other parents there. Mr. Henderson, the biology teacher who leads the Costa Rica trip, walked us through the itinerary: three days with a local host family, helping tag sea turtle nests on the Pacific coast, a hike through Arenal Volcano National Park, a workshop on sustainable coffee farming. It sounded cool, I got exactly why kids were excited.
Then someone raised their hand and asked the question everyone was thinking: how much? $3,200 per student, not including spending money or travel insurance. The room went quiet for a second. Then another mom asked about scholarships. The principal said they have three full need-based scholarships each year for any of the trips, and the PTA organizes group fundraisers—bake sales, car washes, a concession stand at football games—where all the money gets split evenly between kids who need help covering costs. No individual fundraising where kids have to go door to door selling candy or ask relatives for donations, which I thought was a good call.
After that, I started thinking: okay, is this actually normal? I called my friend Lila, who’s a curriculum coordinator for a local district, and she told me it’s way more common now than it was 10 or 15 years ago. Post-pandemic, a lot of schools are pushing for more hands-on, out-of-classroom learning to make up for the social and academic gaps kids had during remote school. International trips get framed as global learning, which is a big priority for a lot of schools right now, public and private. So yeah, it’s normal—meaning it’s common, it’s happening at a lot of schools across the country, not just fancy elite private academies anymore. But normal doesn’t mean it’s one-size-fits-all, and it doesn’t mean you have to participate if it doesn’t work for your family.
If you’re staring at a flyer just like I was, the first thing to do is check the basics before you even think about cost. Ask how many times the school has run the trip, what training the adult leaders have, and what emergency protocols they have in place. When I asked that at the info night, I found out all the leaders do a 40-hour training on international group safety and wilderness first aid, and the school has a 24/7 emergency contact with the US embassy for every trip they run. That’s not something I would’ve thought to check off the bat, but it’s non-negotiable.
Second, ask explicitly about accessibility options. Don’t assume there’s no help if you can’t afford the full cost. Most schools that offer these trips want to avoid leaving low-income kids out, so they often have more funding than they advertise. At the same time, if you can’t swing it even with help, you don’t have to feel guilty about saying no. Instead of just saying “we can’t afford it” and leaving it at that, help your kid find a comparable experience that fits your budget. When I told my son we couldn’t do Costa Rica this year—$3200 is more than our whole family’s annual vacation budget—he was disappointed, obviously. He moped through taco night and played three extra hours of Roblox that night. But I looked up a week-long conservation trip run by our local county park district, where kids work on native bird habitat restoration and camp out in the woods for a week. It’s $450, and we were able to cover that easily. He likes bird watching, so now he’s just as excited about that trip as he was about Costa Rica. We also go to a church with a lot of immigrant families, so we connected him with a family from Costa Rica that comes every month for dinner, and he practices his Spanish with their kids. It’s not the same as traveling there, but it gives him a lot of the same cross-cultural, hands-on learning he would’ve gotten on the school trip, for a fraction of the cost.
I still think it’s a little strange that middle schools are planning trips across continents now. It’s normal for a lot of schools these days, but that doesn’t erase the fact that it’s still out of reach for a lot of families, and that it can create a weird divide between kids who get to go and kids who don’t. My son is already talking about saving for the Japan trip when he’s in 8th grade. We put $20 a month into a savings jar for it, and we’ll see how it goes. If we can’t make it work, we’ll find something else that fits. Normal doesn’t have to mean mandatory, after all.
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