So you’ve decided to be a chaperone on a school trip? Don’t worry! The job is fairly straightforward. As a chaperone, you’re there to help the trip leader manage the students and ensure everything runs smoothly. You’re also a major part of keeping students safe during an overnight field trip. If it’s one of your first times as a chaperone, you might feel like you’re not sure what’s expected of you or what you’re supposed to do on the trip. Here are a few things you should know and be prepared for so that you’re as much help to the trip leader as possible.
Paperwork
Let’s get the boring part out of the way first. There will be some paperwork. It might seem like paperwork and field trips wouldn’t go together, but there are lots of forms and information that you’ll need to have on hand as a chaperone like permission slips and a list of students on the trip.
For starters, you’ll need emergency contact info. You’ll need to know who to contact in case of emergencies. Sometimes, the trip leader will present each chaperone with the cell phone numbers of the parent/guardian of the students in their small group. Other times the trip leader will keep all of the contact information in a central place. You’ll need to know how the trip leader handles this information.
Another thing you’ll likely have on hand is a roster of the students’ names in your group. After a few days, you’ll likely know them well enough not to need a sheet, but in the beginning, calling roll to check in is a good way to ensure you have your entire group. Don’t rely on just counting heads! Children have a tendency to move around, and if you’re just counting heads you might accidentally count another chaperone’s student who has just wandered over to talk to their friends.
Depending on how the trip group leader has organized the trip, you might also receive a printed daily trip itinerary. This can help you keep track of your day and ensure you’re meeting up with the larger group at appropriate times. But be warned, in many cities, the itinerary is fluid. A whole host of variables such as weather, street closures, traffic, lost students, bus breakdowns, or any other number of things can alter the schedule. In many cases, the itinerary serves as more of a guideline than a strict schedule.
First Aid
As a chaperone, you may be asked to carry a first aid kit for your group. In some rare cases, they may even ask you to become first aid certified. Even if that’s not the case, you should consider having a travel-size first aid kit with the basic necessities with you during the day. Unless you’re going into the woods hiking, the emphasis of your first aid kit should be band-aids, things to deal with blisters from walking, things to help stop nosebleeds, and medicine for nausea/digestive issues. Some over-the-counter painkillers might help as well, but check first to see if your school district and school administrator will allow you to share such things with the students.
Be sure to bring a backpack or bag that you don’t mind carrying all day and that can fit your first aid kit and the paperwork. This will make it much easier to stay organized throughout the trip. Pro tip: you should probably pick up a few pens or pencils to help out students who lose theirs.
Managing Students
The main focus of your role as a field trip chaperone is to manage your group of students during the school trip. You’ll be responsible for leading them through trip activities, answering questions, and keeping them on track everyday especially to make sure they get on the school buses.
You may be nervous about how to handle poor student behavior. Don’t worry, that’s common. It’s crucial for you to remember that you also have the trip leader to help you. If someone in your group is not participating or following your instructions, reach out to the trip leader for help. For the most part, however, students are well-behaved on school trips because they’re having fun and exploring new places. Your job is just to help them experience everything they can while they’re there but also show them what behavioral expectations are required on the trip.
Group Dynamics
Depending on how the trip leader manages the group, you will most likely wind up with a small number of students “assigned” to you. Throughout the trip, take note of how your group is interacting. All too often, there will be one or two shy students in your group. Take steps to see that they’re included in whatever the group is doing. Ask them questions and involve them in an activity. When the other students see you drawing them out of their shells, they’ll be more likely to interact with them as well. Prioritize the whole group over small friend groupings if possible.
Staying on Schedule
Lastly, as a chaperone, you’ll want to ensure that your group stays on schedule. You don’t want it to be your group that is slowing down everyone else. This might mean you have to ensure that everyone is in the parking lot and on the bus by a certain time, or that you meet up for meals at the scheduled time.
It can be difficult to wrangle a group of students to all be in one place at once. There are a couple of schools of thought on how to make this easier. Some chaperones like to share the daily itinerary with the students at the day’s beginning and remind them of various times throughout the day. This is effective only as long as the schedule isn’t being adjusted. It might be wiser to simply focus on what’s next. Having only one time to focus on can make it much easier for the kids to stay on target with the schedule.
The other two factors that cause lateness are distance and bathrooms. When granted time to explore, students often don’t factor in how long it will take to walk back to the meeting point. It can help if you keep your group updated as to how long it will take to get back to the rest of the group from wherever you currently are. And of course, bathrooms. Most students (and adults too, for that matter) wait until the last moment to use the bathroom. Unfortunately, when you’re dealing with large groups of people, that just doesn’t work. Encourage your students to use the bathroom throughout the day, and not just right before you leave one destination for another.
How to Be a Good Chaperone with Your Child on the Trip
If you’ve volunteered to be a chaperone, it’s likely that one of your children is on the trip. The natural inclination is to focus on your own child. After all, that’s why you came on this trip! You wanted to spend time with your child in a fun new environment. However, you need to make sure that you’re not focusing on one student to the exclusion of others.
Many trip leaders will welcome you as a chaperone, but may not assign your own child to your group. This is usually a result of problems experienced in the past. All too often, parents on the trip will try to maximize time with their own children, which can diminish their effectiveness as a chaperone. Remember, you’re responsible for multiple kids. Even if your child is in another chaperone’s group, you’ll still have plenty of time to be around your student during the trip.
Since you want your child to have the best experience possible, it’s common to want to get something “extra” for them. Maybe you’re buying cupcakes for everyone in your group, or maybe you’d like to take your child off for a special meal or event. As laudable as your thinking is, try to imagine it in the context of the entire group. If a small subset of the students is receiving extras, it can make things more difficult for the trip leader and other chaperones.
A final word of warning to all parent chaperones – don’t take up all of your student’s free time. School trips are some of the most important opportunities for children to socialize in groups away from school. If you are by your child’s side at every moment, it can actually serve to isolate them from the other kids.
Be Prepared to Have Fun!
Chaperoning a school trip can be an incredibly fun experience. Just be sure that you prioritize the trip leader’s plan and the student’s safety. Thinking through how you want to fulfill your responsibilities as a chaperone before the trip even begins can remove much of the stress from the process.
At GL Travel, we help teachers and chaperones prepare for memorable trips with their students. Contact us today to see what trips we offer and how we make the process easy.