All-School Trip
The annual All-School Trip is a highlight of the Buxton year. Here, our progressive ideals are really put into action, as the entire school goes on the road to learn from (very real, very intense) experience.
A group of older students helps to plan and run and week-long trip to a North American city that is anything but the typical tourist excursion students may have experienced in the past. The school breaks into study groups that each focus on an issue of interest in the city—ranging from looking at the mural projects in Philadelphia to urban planning in New Orleans to homelessness in Washington, D.C.—and spend the time before the trip researching their topics and planning their time. As the students ask themselves “Who do I need to talk to? What do I need to see? What do I need to do to find out as much about this topic as possible?,” they develop leads and plans for the week, making calls and appointments as appropriate.
While on the trip, each group (usually made up of several students and a faculty member) travels the city to do interviews and explore their topic. By the end of the week, the group usually has a vivid understanding of their subject matter and starts to plan how to present their findings to the rest of the school—something they will do upon return to Buxton.
We also take our All-School Play on the road with us, performing it several times in the visited city. Everyone in the school is involved in the production, whether it be backstage or on-. The performances are a way of giving back to the city we’re visiting, and they give the trip community coherence at the end of days spent with groups heading every-which-way on the trail of their subjects.
The All-School Trip gives students a hand-on education in how the world works, and it has inspired more than a few of our graduates to pursue journalism, documentary filmmaking, and other ways of investigating and understanding the world first-hand.