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As many of you know, we’ve been dealing with a family health crisis these last seven months. My son Luke has been battling Hodgkins lymphoma while attending high school and swimming for the LHS team, which the Sun wrote about here. After watching him endure months of chemotherapy and radiation, last Tuesday we travelled to Children’s Hospital in Boston for a day of tests and post-treatment scans to determine if we had killed the disease. We got the results that the scans were clear just hours before last Wednesday’s school committee meeting. By Thursday evening, we had packed the car, picked up two more kids—one friend for each of ours—and headed to the White Mountains for a long weekend of cross-country skiing, skating, snowboarding (the boys), and best-of-all, sitting in a steaming hot tub surrounded by mountains with snowflakes kissing our cheeks. (That is, until the boys snowboarded to the base and threw snowballs at us!) Despite driving home in last night’s blizzard, the entire trip was a much-needed escape from months of worry, heart-wrenching treatments, and stress. It occurred to me as we travelled the winding roads and I marveled at the evergreens clothed in thick white blankets, a living testament to beauty and strength: We suffer so we can appreciate the magnitude of our blessings.

At the Lowell School Committee meeting last week, more than 18 travel requests were unanimously approved, including several involving students travelling out of the country (one during school vacation in 2011). While the committee voted to approve these future trips, a group of students from the LHS Crew Team and their coaches were traveling in Europe. The group kept a daily log of their experiences online, which you can access here.

As mentioned in an earlier post, more information on the updated policy regarding student travel follows: The new policy requires that trips be approved BEFORE any money is collected from students and families. In addition, field trips—that is, travel that does not include students representing Lowell Schools in a formal event, such as a sporting or band competition, requires written justification of learning standards if students will miss time from school.  The new policy does not minimize the importance of student travel or the educational and cultural learning involved in such experiences, but is more in line with the district’s policy regarding attendance. Since parents are expected to plan trips during school vacation and not impose on the 180 days of instructional time allotted each year, field trips are also encouraged to occur during vacation periods. If there is to be time lost from school, the approval process calls for discussion and voting on a case-by-case basis with consideration given to the justification for days missed. For the full policy, see: more »