Insight: Oh The Places They Will Go

By David Kelly-Hedrick, Experiential Education Coordinator 

Oh, the places your students are going for EBC 2025!  Over five hundred students from EPS will be heading out on such an array of activities and experiences for their experiential week of education beginning tomorrow morning.  In many ways, parenting is a continuous cycle of sending out and gathering back our young people.  Just before I started writing this note, I received a text and photo from one of our daughters hiking in a rainstorm on the coast of Ireland.  We live vicariously with and for the adventures of all our young people.

So, thank you, parents, guardians, and families for your amazing support of your students and the school chaperones who will accompany them on the EBC experiences.  Not only do you support this experience by funding the travel and program expenses, but you also bestow your trust upon us as chaperones.  Travel can be a challenging and fearful experience, and there can be a wide array of stresses in this for many students, and also for the chaperone leaders.  Our EBC groups have the full support of our administration, along with other levels of security and backup such as our program partners and with our membership in International SOS.  We are planning to make these experiences as rich and safe as possible and stand by to address concerns and needs should they arise.

We have asked our chaperones to provide two or three communication points during the week with brief updates and hopefully a couple of photos for families back home.  The communications will vary depending on the specific EBC experience and will come via TeamSnap or email, or perhaps posting to a blog, depending on the EBC group and their access to communication networks.  No news is good news that things are flowing well, and that students are fully engaged in the wide array and range of activities planned for them.

At EPS, we come together to make a community.  The recent Culture Fair was a magnanimous event of sharing and celebrating many cultures represented at this school.  Now, we depart this community and go out to practice and test our values in other places and communities around the world.  Hopefully, we learn and engage with curiosity, openness, and humility.  Following EBC is spring break, and we know this is a valuable time for students, families, and faculty/staff, for all of us to relax and recharge before the final stretch of spring trimester.  Please enjoy your spring breaks in the many ways you plan for time off and recreation.  We look forward to hearing the great stories and accounts from all the adventuring when we return later in April.