For the past six years, Asheville Middle School has offered a capstone travel experience to our eighth-grade students. The teachers at Asheville Middle School have chaperoned over 1,200 students on a trip to the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This is a huge undertaking, but one that the school community feels is a necessary learning and life experience for so many of our students.
Our students are exposed to a variety of academic and social experiences. They have the opportunity to learn about our state’s history, investigate marine life, experience the ocean and visit historical sites connected with our Essential Standards.
As a school community, we have dedicated ourselves to take all students who are interested in attending the Outer Banks trip with us, regardless of their financial situations. AMS conducts site-based fundraisers; we are supported by our PTO; and solicit support from our staff. Each year, however, the number of students in need of financial assistance outgrows our ability to fulfill our promise to take all of our students.
The all-inclusive cost of the four-day, three-night trip is $450. We travel March 27-30, 2017.
The importance of this trip for so many of our students cannot be underestimated. This trip is life-changing to some of our students and may be the only opportunity they have to leave Western North Carolina. Please consider supporting our students and our community in making this trip a possibility for all of our students.
Checks can be sent/made out to Asheville Middle School, 211 S. French Broad Ave., Asheville, NC 28801. We also have a GoFundMe campaign at https://www.gofundme.com/AMSOBX2017
— Dr. Amanda Swartzlander
Assistant Principal
Asheville Middle School
27 thoughts on “Letter writer: Students need support for Outer Banks trip”
“The check’s in the mail”
Get this, you from ‘not here’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEFVwlpGkm0
Me, as a response, for you never working in the education biz.
Denigrate education, and watch me denigrate your posts.
Yet again and again and again.
“This is a huge undertaking”
Hey, precious snowflakes, go fund yourself. When I traveled to the Outer Banks in high school, I carpooled, slept in a tent, cooked my meals over an open campfire, and woke up on the beach to a 2-hour sunrise.
What got me was this:
“This trip is life-changing to some of our students and may be the only opportunity they have to leave Western North Carolina.”
Wow talk about low expectations, from an educator no less. Not much motivation or inspiration there.
That’s also how students still fund trips to the coast, genius. They raise money the entire school year by doing good stuff for humanity that Tea Partiers call
‘snowflake’ behavior, eating camping type food like PB n J and trail mix, sleep in tents and carpool.
Try posting sometime after putting some time into working as an educator. Some time as in decades.
I’ve always subscribed to the magazine whose motto is “Those who can, do; and those who can’t, teach.” Well, yeah, sorta true. It’s kind of like what an engineer once told me – “All salesmen are liars”. Well I knew then, and I know much more now, that he was exaggerating. That’s only true about 99% of the time.
With apologies to teachers and sales persons; I have an irreverent sense of humor.
If the phrase ‘those who can do, do, and those who can’t teach’ is indeed true, would not you have been educated by a series of incompetents? And would that not make you incompetent as a result?
You can always tell a wacko righty by their hatred of all things learnin.
Here’s a quote to try as an alternative.
‘You have to know the rules in order to break them’.
Of all people, I read that in an early 1980’s interview of …Eddie Van Halen.
Yeah, I know, who would’ve thought?
I hope every single one of your teachers is reading your comments dealing with teachers being worthless.
That’s like school on a Saturday- no class.
Well actually, once I realized how incompetent my teachers had made me, I started educating myself and became competent. I know that’s probably a little hard for you to understand, but you’re a teacher, right?
Blame the teachers always works as a fallback ideology I suppose.
The Latin root of education is educare I believe, which literally means to draw out. The most common mistake children and adults make is assuming that education is a passive exercise, ala a nice way of me saying you’ll get no sympathy from me if you didn’t apply yourself as a lad.
I suppose America’s schools are so awful that all those refugees from 3rd World countries risk life and limb in order to attend them here and give their kids a chance at learnin and such.
Absolutely, these kids will have a great experience.
I do think Vice Principal Swartzlander has a sense of the dramatic, however, when she says that this trip “is life changing….and may be the only opportunity they have to leave WNC…”. Maybe even a little presumptuous?
Yes, they will learn some state history, experience the ocean, etc., but the real experience is being away from home with your peers, having the opportunity to take responsibility for yourself and your classmates in a new, unknown environment.
It is wonderful that some in the community may wish to donate to help out.
Would I be out of order to assume that you are also planning fund raising events? Kids washing cars? Selling baked goods? Both those whose families can afford the $450 as well as those who cannot? Teaching the kids that anything worthwhile takes some work and planning? If this is what you are referring to when fund raising SITES are mentioned, then I apologize, however, it sounds more like kids standing on corners with buckets
Maybe I’m just envious that in my youth “Go Fund Me” did not exist. And we would be quite appreciative and excited if anyone else in
the community helped us out. Most likely we would offer to wash their windows, car, etc. Kind of old fashioned, but it did seem to teach responsibility for self, appreciation of the good experiences in life, and how to work to get what you want.
Is this what Essential Standards instructs?
I really do applaud the school for taking on the challenge of offering the kids this opportunity. So please do not misunderstand my message, which is that perhaps this trip also offers the opportunity for a greater life experience that learning more state history and seeing the ocean.
Essential Standards has nothing to do with funding end of year school trips, as all ES is is a scam by testing companies to force standardized fill in the bubble tests down school’s throats.
Teachers and students refer to it as George Bush’s “War on Education”.
I would invite any dissenting posters here to call up any local school and find out for themselves what it takes in order to move 30 hormone-addled middle school children across the state, play wet nurse for a handful of insane (from raising a middle schooler without a reliable babysitter once in a while) parent chaperones, gas up chaperone’s vehicles, feed everyone, figure out lodging, dole out meds to all the kids who need it as there is no school nurse, figure out how to occupy them for say 4 days and call it learning, and get home again on a Sunday and still show up fresh as a daisy on a Monday.
That tired me out for just typing it.
George W Bush, oops.
Totally agree. It becomes a huge logistical (and nursemaid, authority figure, absentee parent) effort.
Definitely to be admired. Good people all.
Yes, we must encourage all WNC ‘educators’ to implore their students to strive to move on to better opportunities in the REAL world outside here…What I don’t understand is why so many choose to stay here and be so poor when, thru multiple generations available better jobs were always in other places … Leaving WNC to live other places should be highly encouraged for the students’ benefit.
The issue re BETTER OPPORTUNITIES is not so much moving away from home turf to find jobs, as there are obviously jobs
available in WNC on all levels of training and suitability.
The issue is, and has always been, parenting. Responsible parenting producing successful kids for generations has been all about
parents wishing for their children a “better life” than they have experienced.
The vast majority of those who have enjoyed the life style benefits of “being more successful” (a subjective factor) than their parents, almost always describe how their parents pushed them hard to get good grades, to be taught the value of work early in life (paper routes, mowing lawns, etc.), and sacrificed in many ways to achieve their goal of providing opportunities for their children that they did not experience for themselves.
Indeed, this very human generational trait is the motivating force behind most of those immigrants who sacrifice everything and leave their homelands to get their families into our country, the Land of Opportunity. That is, if you are willing to work for it.
I suppose that’s why you stuck round here post graduation?
“the REAL world” — hey Infidel, I’ve trademarked that name! Royalties must be remitted.
MTV Productions, 1992 trademarked that name.
The same way there was a book before a Led Zeppelin song with a what, 45 minute or so drum solo called Moby Dick.
Low expectations, INDEED, by this government screwl ‘principal’ … sheesh…that’s the mentality of the liberal progressive leftwingers who have ruined ‘public’ education in Amerikkka.
Care to elaborate how ‘lib’rls runined education’?
I’d love to hear you share. Is it teaching civics, reading banned books or evolution that you object to?
denouncing the teaching of Amerikkkan history and the rewriting of that which is ‘allowed’…government screwls are nothing but anti Amerikkkan indoctrination centers run by nasty progressives.
Again, please provide specific examples.
observe , yourself, it’s very obvious and presented proudly by the screwls…duh.
hmmm…why not tell your very own City Schools Foundation to shell out the money for this extravaganza ? They always have plenty of compassion …
Is it really fair and equitable for this single group of eighth graders to take this kind of trip when all the other eighth graders are not ‘getting to do it’ ? Is that the kind of intown city privilege you want to demonstrate to all the others ? hmmm…
OMG- chaperone estrogen/testosterone waking kids? Come with a prescription for extreme exposure to sun and children?