This One Guy Made the Washington DC Field Trip a Middle School Rite of Passage
A single teacher is responsible for more than 1 million eighth graders visiting the nation’s capital every year.
If you’ve been to Washington, DC, between March and June, you’ve undoubtedly seen swarms of them scattered around the National Mall and blooming with vibrant colors—a scenic backdrop to some of the nation’s most iconic landmarks.
No, not the cherry blossoms. It’s the middle school T-shirt, the unofficial signal that spring has sprung in the nation’s capital.
Every year, more than one million eighth graders—about one in every three—can be seen running up and down the National Mall in matching school-colored tees, pacing awkwardly in the Smithsonian, taking lunch at the L’Enfant Plaza and Pentagon City food courts, and racking up soda fountain tabs at the Hard Rock Cafe.
A field trip that started as a business idea has since evolved into a decades-long tradition, bolstering economies and creating entirely new ones. And while it’s become the subject of debate in school districts from Ohio to Massachusetts, in DC, it remains both a fact of life and a total vibe.
Filling the Void
In the fall of 1963, Phil Wendel began teaching at Northwood Junior High School in Highland Park, Illinois. Later that academic year, in the spring of 1964, he led his first class of students to Washington, DC.
It was quite a different experience from what you might expect of DC tourism these days. In the 1960s, due to political strife and moral resentment against America’s involvement in Vietnam, many young people didn’t have an interest in visiting the president’s house. Bus companies and airlines took note, leaving a void for trips centered around our nation’s history for younger generations. Moreover, Wendel tells me that during his initial trip, “I’m listening to some tour guide who’s probably been picked off the corner, and he’s lecturing kids.”
Convinced he could do better, Wendel coordinated the following year’s trip with a fellow teacher, attempting to give his students a more academically driven experience. The year after that, he founded Lakeland Tours solely to coordinate travel for eighth graders to DC Wendel sold Lakeland Tours in 1999, but he estimates the company helped bring a million students to DC overall; the company is now known as WorldStrides, one of the largest student tourism companies in the country.
All the while, much larger trends were emerging as well. One of the most important—beyond the rapid growth in air travel—was the evolving access to museums. In the early 20th century, museums were seen as bastions of elitism, a place where culture lived but only existed for those deemed worthy of entry. “Culture for culture’s sake was what the Smithsonian meant to its lay visitors,” wrote Louise Connolly in her 1914 book, The Educational Value of Museums. “Young people led through it contracted, not the museum habit, but museophobia, a horror of museums.”
But that sentiment began to change heading into World War II with the rise of the museum as an educational companion (the concept of “visual education,” i.e., using visual aids to enforce concepts, was introduced in the early 1920s). No longer were museums reserved just for the upper echelons; they were a place to engage, learn, and question, no matter who you were.
Today, museums welcome approximately 55 million students from school groups.
How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?
But the field trip to Washington, DC is special for another reason: Nearly every student who goes experiences nearly the exact same itinerary.
For three to five days—the usual length of the trip—students are whisked around the city from dawn until dusk. It’s not atypical for every day to last from 8:30 am to 10 pm, says Lindsay Hill, the associate director of visitor experience and group tours at Destination DC, where she helps tour groups coordinate with tour operators. She says the jam-packed days are a win-win for everyone involved: Students get to see as much of the city as possible, and there’s less time for them to get into trouble (more on that later.)
The usual stops are the usual suspects: the US Capitol, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the MLK Jr. Memorial, several war memorials, the Smithsonian Museums, Arlington National Cemetery, the National Zoo, the Holocaust Museum, and the Ford Theater. (All of these landmarks are free to visit.) You might also have been lucky enough to get a tour of the White House (also free but more challenging to plan), meet your local congressperson, or travel by boat to Mount Vernon to tour George Washington’s landmark estate. Or better yet, maybe you were whisked around DC in an amphibious World War II vehicle— as part of a so-called “duck tour”—allowing you to view landmarks by land and water (a tour that, sadly, no longer operates).
Meanwhile, the Hard Rock Cafe serves as a beacon of sustenance that helps to fuel all that sight-seeing. The Hard Rock not only plans for these travelers—a student group-focused menu, including a soda, entree, and chocolate chip cookies for dessert, ensures that students are “in and out in about an hour,” says Sara Lester, a regional sales and marketing manager at Hard Rock Cafe—but it relies on them, too. Case in point: Through March and April of this year, they’ve welcomed a total of 25,000 eighth graders, putting them on pace to reach 50,000 students by the end of the field trip season.
Not to mention, the Hard Rock isn’t without some political significance. Among its many pieces of music-themed memorabilia, two, in particular, speak to our nation’s history/sense of patriotism: 1) a saxophone played by President Bill Clinton; and 2) a red, white, and blue outfit worn by Beyoncé.
Not-So-Unruly Behavior
Of course, it’s not the wisest decision to put a group of 13- and 14-year-olds together on an airplane or a bus, or at a museum, a restaurant, or a hotel. Yet, it doesn’t lead to nearly as much trouble as you’d think.
“Eighth graders are in a unique position where they’re big enough to be self-reliant, but not so big that they’re going to run out and create havoc in the streets,” explains John Raymond, the vice president of sales and marketing of student tourism company Grand Classroom, which oversees the travel of some 20,000 students to Washington, D.C. annually.
Raymond estimates that over the course of three decades, there have been just five or six instances where students were sent home on a trip. If anything, such rarity speaks perfectly to the eighth-grade mindset. “You don’t want to be outside of the herd. You don’t want to draw unnecessary attention to yourself,” Raymond says.
It helps, too, that the trip isn’t cheap—prices average from $2,000 to $3,000 per student. Additionally, parents must sign a liability waiver that holds them responsible for any financial damages incurred by their child, and no kid wants to have that conversation with mom and dad.
That said, if there is a mischievous will, eighth graders will surely find a way, an attitude that prompted Wendel, while at Lakeland Tours, to hire enlisted military members to sit outside students’ hotel rooms to ensure they didn’t sneak out at night. “That isn’t to say that the kids didn’t win some of the battles,” Wendel says. “But once we had a lights out or a curfew, with about 99% certainty, we were able to keep the kids confined to their rooms.”
It’s worth noting, too, that any havoc the students create is often unintentional and harmless. Or, in true eighth-grade fashion, just plain awkward. “I was accidentally locked in my hotel bathroom during my eighth-grade field trip to DC,” recalls Dan Howie, now a recruiting manager from North Carolina. “Maintenance had to come in and drill through the lock. It took about two hours for them to get me out, and there was quite an audience waiting to see if I’d emerge. It certainly added to my eighth-grade cool-kid mystique.”
The Kids Are Alright
The tours obviously must change with the times. Or better put, with the generations that take them. To that end, Hill, of DC Destination, notes that students increasingly want to experience not only the national attractions but also what the DC metro area has to offer in terms of music venues, artistic murals, and neighborhoods.
As a result, what may be thought of as a few days for students to get away from their parents and vice-versa—a pitch that Wendel used while working at Lakeland—has become an opportunity for personal growth and cultural exposure. “Getting outside of your home base and what’s comfortable for you is where the change in perspective and the ability to really understand different cultures and people’s backgrounds comes from,” Hill says.
For that alone, maybe it’s worth the trip—matching T-shirts and all.