Oconto Falls School Board approves student trip to Spain in 2021

OCONTO FALLS — Advanced Spanish students at Oconto Falls High School will have an opportunity to travel to Spain during the 2020-21 school year, after the School Board approved the department’s request Oct. 14.

Teachers Hannah Zidon and Susan Ziolkowski-Stiede presented a report on a trip earlier this year when 31 students from the Oconto Falls Spanish III and IV students to Madrid and Barcelona with excursions to two nearby towns.

“Our students found it amazing,” Zidon said. “A lot of them had very successful interactions in Spanish. They got to see a lot of things that we had studied, things like flamenco dance, we went to art museums and saw art that they had studied in class — it was a really great opportunity.”

The department is again working with a company called Education First, which provided a full-time tour director and planned the itinerary this year. Zidon added that they are also getting quotes from other companies for prices and itineraries even though they were pleased with Education First.

Based on this year’s experience, the next trip will see some tweaks.

“One of our main concerns was to give students as much opportunity to be active during the day, so we wanted to cut down on the free time that they had,” Zidon said. “We want to give them activities to get the most out of their experience.”

The nine-day tour will again feature Madrid and Barcelona but also a few more local day trips to nearby locales. The group would fly out of Chicago instead of Green Bay to cut down on costs, she said.

In addition to the $3,500 to $4,000 cost of the trip, which the students pay, they will be required to take out trip insurance for an estimated $165.

“That guarantees the company would be liable for anything that might go wrong. delayed flights, lost luggage, problems with hotel stays,” Zidon said.

Superintendent Dean Hess said that’s for the families’ protection. He shared the story of a colleague in another district where a similar trip had to be canceled and, having declined the trip insurance package, several parents lost thousands of dollars.

A minimum of 12 students is needed to give the trip the green light — the company pays for one chaperone per six students, one male, one female. Zidon said they’re expecting about 25 to 30 students to want to go.

Currently, 55 students are taking Spanish II, and Spanish III has about 27 students, she said. Those young people will be in Spanish III and IV when the trip is scheduled, and the journey will be limited to the students in those classes.

“We see it as an incentive and a motivator for students to continue their studies into those upper levels,” Zidon said. “And then we have students who know enough Spanish to be able to interact and appreciate the experience.”