All-School Trip PHILADELPHIA, PA 2008

The All-School Trip

At the end of the winter term, the entire school travels to a major city. Atlanta, Chicago, Havana, Mexico City, Toronto, and Washington, D.C. have been visited in recent years. This event is of central importance in the school year. Students help plan and execute every aspect of the trip, from the initial discussions of which city to visit to the minute details of life during the actual traveling. Students and faculty participate in small project groups to study social, economic, and political issues of the city, making for a mutual learning experience. The entire Buxton community, as actors, crew, or musicians, also takes part in the All-School Play, which is performed several times during the trip. This is both a unifying experience for the Buxton community and an opportunity for the school to make a meaningful, personal contribution to the city. Upon returning to Buxton, students make presentations to the school regarding their projects. Reports and creative contributions are published as a book.

This year, Buxton will be travelling to Philadelphia, PA. The all-school play, Jabberwock by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, will be performed in three locations:

Monday, March 3rd at 7:00 pm at Martin’s Run
11 Martin’s Run, Media, PA telephone: 610-353-7660

Tuesday, March 4th at 7:00 pm at Sterling Glen
150 No. 20th Street, Philadelphia, PA telephone: 215-564-5455

Thursday, March 6th at 6:00pm at St. Joseph's Manor
1616 Huntington Pike Meadowbrook, PA telephone: 215-938-4000

Everyone is most welcome, and we would enjoy having you at one of these performances -- please come! All performances are free of charge. The final performance of our play will be in the Buxton theatre on Friday, March 14th at 8:00 p.m., the evening before the start of Spring vacation on Saturday, March 15th. As this is the formal closing of the three-week trip experience, we hope to see you there.

Last year , Buxton traveled to New Orleans. We will be posting more photos and information from the trip very soon. Thank you for your patience. Until then, you can read the article that ran on the front page of the Berkshire Eagle below, or link to its page directly here:

Junior Natalie Jimenez, member of the Manual Labor group clearing out a house in the Lower Ninth Ward.

Contents of the house that the group worked on.

Studying Katrina's damage
Local students take trip to New Orleans
By Jessica Willis, Berkshire Eagle Staff
Berkshire Eagle
Friday, March 09,2007

WILLIAMSTOWN — For the past week, Buxton School students and faculty have been on a field trip they won't soon forget.
This year's "all-school trip" took the small, private boarding and day high school's 85 students and 14 faculty members from South Street in Williamstown to New Orleans — a city currently in what Buxton's associate director Franny Shuker-Haines called the "throes" of crisis.

"If there was ever a time to study issues like urban planning in New Orleans, it's now," she said in a recent phone interview from her home in Williamstown.

In past all-school trips, she said, students visited cities such as Washington, D.C., and San Juan, Puerto Rico, and their studies — which would include surveys of the art, culture, geography, history and municipal issues of their subject, would be "forensic" in nature.
"They would be studying something from the past," she said.

Not so with post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, which has been in the midst of a very present-day struggle to repair and re-identify itself. "And the issues are trying to work out as we speak," Shuker-Haines said.

Meanwhile, Buxton students and teachers currently in New Orleans say that the city, 18 months after the disaster, is a place of extremes.
"The residential areas are shocking," Buxton teacher Timothy Shuker-Haines said in a telephone interview yesterday. "We were driving in the Lower Ninth Ward (one of the areas hit hardest by the hurricane) yesterday, and we went blocks and blocks without seeing a person or a car."

Shuker-Haines, who is Franny's husband, added that "three-quarters of the houses (in the ward) don't exist, and all you see are concrete steps leading up to nothingness," where a structure once stood.

But, at the same time, the tourist centers of the city — the Garden District and the French Quarter — appear untouched by the devastation.

"If you came here as a tourist, you could think nothing happened," he added. "But it continues to be a real disaster. It's just monumental. More than 80 percent of the city was flooded, and half of the houses were destroyed or severely damaged."

He also mentioned that New Orleans is suffering from "burnout" in the national press, and that the media's similar fixation on the city's post-Katrina crime spike is stalling tourism and growth.

"The part of the city we're staying in (the centrally located tourist area) seems very safe," he said. "People should come here. Tourism is New Orleans' bread and butter."
Shuker-Haines' particular group is studying urban planning, and other groups are studying New Orleans' poverty, race, crime and ecological issues. Other students are performing community service for the area, and still others are recording residents' personal stories about the hurricane.

"We've talked to journalists from the Times-Picayune, Tulane (University) urban planners and a lot of community members," Shuker-Haines said. "We're getting lots of different viewpoints."

When it comes to getting funds for the rebuilding process, "The city is in a holding pattern," he said. "Lots of money is promised, but none is coming through. They need an approved plan."

Shuker-Haines said the city has scrapped three rebuilding plans — a "tremendously unpopular" one submitted by FEMA and two submitted by New Orleans Mayor C. Ray Nagin; the former was rejected by the community and the latter was seen by the federal government as "not stringent enough." But the fourth attempt, called the "Unified New Orleans Plan," has come closest to garnering both community and federal approval.

Today, he said, his group will be talking to a major developer who wants to create mixed-income housing.
"It's an unbelievably huge thing," he said. "Never has a city had to rebuild itself at this level."

He added that the students will present their findings in a series of projects beginning next week. They will return to Williamstown tomorrow.
Stefan Ward-Wheten, an 18-year-old Buxton senior from Williamstown, also is taking part in the "analysis of neighborhoods" in New Orleans.

"There are a lot of new ideas and increasing momentum," he said. "There was a sense after the storm that New Orleans would have to be rebuilt like a conventional city. But it's being rebuilt in its own image, after all."

New Orleans, he said in yesterday's telephone interview, is one that identifies itself by its neighborhoods, and there "are very deep roots on blocks and streets, and families will stay for hundreds of years."

The "close-to-the-ground communal ethic was washed away" by the hurricane, he added ruefully.

He noted that the locals are torn between wanting their neighborhoods back and the painful knowledge that, post-Katrina, "irrevocable damage" was done to their old home.
Despite the tragedy, however, some Big Easy residents are choosing to lampoon their sadness and frustration toward the city's municipal nightmare; Ward-Wheten said there is a new satirical publication called "The New Orleans Levee" being distributed in the city.

"The free publication's motto is 'We don't hold anything back,' " he added with a wry laugh.

As on other all-school trips, the Buxton students will be presenting a play to its host city; this year, the students are performing a stage adaptation of Henry Fielding's "Tom Jones."

The play will be presented at an elementary school, at a retirement community and at a children's hospital.

"It's a way for us to give back on some level," Ward-Wheten said.