With COVID-era travel restrictions in the rearview mirror, school-sponsored student travel is quickly accelerating back to pre-pandemic levels. As an integral part of the curriculum and an engine to provide a vibrant and expansive curriculum and student experience, independent schools are eagerly reincorporating international trips, exchange programs, and other student trips and travel opportunities into their educational programs. Like any other vacation from the ordinary, school-sponsored trips carry with them risks that could cause substantial harm to participants and create serious liability for the school.

Before greenlighting a school-sponsored trip, it is imperative that independent schools develop policies and procedures strategies for ensuring that trips are organized in a consistent manner, with student safety as the highest priority. School leaders should consider developing and implementing a risk management plan for student travel, which outlines the procedures and protocols that faculty members must follow when planning school-sponsored trips and activities. This article will outline the basis components of a risk management plan for school-sponsored travel, and discuss key factors to consider when planning a school-sponsored trip.

Components of a Risk Management Plan

Trip Vetting Process

Before any trip is organized, the school should have a procedure in place for vetting ideas/proposals for new field trips and for recurring trips. Faculty and staff with ideas for a school-sponsored trip should be required to submit proposals for field trips to a committee, comprising a variety of school stakeholders, including the applicable division head, CFO/business officer, dean of students, and school nurse, who will be responsible for approving any proposed student trips. Faculty members should not commit funds or enter into any agreements with third parties to participate in a trip before the school has vetted them.

The school's planning and approval procedure should require the trip sponsor to create and submit a trip proposal that outlines the details and plans for the proposed trip, and should include, at minimum, the following information:

• Purpose of the Program: Why will students participate in the trip? How does it tie into the course curriculum?
• Destination: Is the destination safe? Identify known risks and how trip leaders will address them.
• Transportation and Accommodations: Which methods of transportation will be used? What kinds of accommodations will trip participants stay in? What are the projected costs for the transportation and accommodation options selected, and how will the costs be distributed among trip participants?
• Third-Party Vendors: It is common to engage third parties to organize and operate tours and other activities. Has the trip leader vetted possible third-party vendors to provide services during the trip? If so, copies of any vendor contracts should be submitted to the risk management committee for review and approval prior to entering into any formal agreement.
• Trip Activities: What will students be doing on the trip? Are there any activities that are inherently or particularly dangerous?
• Trip Participants: How many students are anticipated to attend the trip? How many chaperones will be needed? How many chaperones will be parent volunteers versus school faculty and staff? Will the school nurse be required to attend?
• Crisis Management: What if there is a disaster or emergency event? Is there an evacuation plan? A shelter in place plan?

Chaperones

An integral part of the trip planning process is ensuring that there is adequate adult supervision during any school-sponsored trip. There is no hard-and-fast rule for determining appropriate student-chaperone ratios; however, trip leaders should consider several factors when determining how many chaperones may be necessary, including the number of students participating, the age and capability of the students participating, the types of activities planned, and the level of anticipated risk. Consider the possibility that a chaperone falls ill during the trip and is unable to continue their duties—will there still be sufficient supervision?

Just as with any other school volunteer, trip chaperones should undergo background screening to ensure that they do not pose a threat to the safety of students. Additionally, all chaperones should receive training on identifying and maintaining appropriate adult-student boundaries, as well as the school's procedures for reporting any boundary-crossing behavior they may witness during a school trip.

Schools should ensure that all chaperones, both faculty/staff and volunteers, understand the rules and responsibilities of chaperones during a school-sponsored trip. Accordingly, as part of its Risk Management Plan for student travel, the school should consider developing written expectations and guidelines for chaperones, including guidelines on managing both student behavior and chaperone behavior. For example, the school's written expectations should outline the school rules in effect for students during the trip and describe the procedures for chaperones to use to report violations and/or enforce rules, if necessary. The written expectations should also set the expectation that chaperones should be "on duty" at all times during the trip and should not treat the trip as a personal vacation. Likewise, the written expectations should outline chaperone conduct that is expressly prohibited, such as drinking alcohol and/or using illicit substances at any time during the trip.

Student Health Concerns and Accommodations

It is imperative that student health and medical concerns are addressed as part of the trip planning process. Thus, ensure that trip leaders are collecting all necessary information regarding participating students' health needs, including all medications taken and any other mental or physical conditions that may affect the students' ability to participate. If students may need accommodations to participate in the trip, ensure that those are discussed with parents beforehand and that an acceptable accommodation is agreed upon.

For students with medication action plans or otherwise are required to take medication during the school day, trip leaders should consult the school nurse to ensure that proper paperwork is in place for students to either (1) carry and administer their medication during a school-sponsored trip, or (2) ensure that trip leaders safely store, transport, and administer the student's medication.

It is important to note that state laws vary significantly with regard to the individuals permitted to administer medication to students during school-sponsored trips. Some states, for example, require a licensed nurse to attend the trip if a student requires assistance administering their medication, while others permit any designated, trained employee or adult to do so. Schools should consult with their legal counsel to understand the applicable state requirements and incorporate them into their risk management plan.

Parent Information and Liability Waivers

To ensure that parents and students understand the risks involved in the trip and the school's expectations, consider holding mandatory parent information sessions, where the trip will be discussed and parents will have the opportunity to ask questions.

After parents have received information about the trip, it is important to require parents to sign and return a trip authorization form, to include a release of liability, for all participants. Authorization forms, in conjunction with parent information sessions, will serve to mitigate the risk of liability to the school should a student become injured or ill as a result of their participation in the trip. To be effective, the parent authorization form should describe the unique risks associated with the specific trip the student is participating in so that parents have a meaningful opportunity to understand what their student may encounter. For example, a camping trip will involve different risks than a trip abroad, so it is important that schools' risk management plans require trip leaders to ensure that a new parent authorization form and release is developed and approved by the risk management committee and/or the school's legal counsel prior to departure.

What About General Activity Waivers?

Many schools include general activity waivers in their enrollment contracts each year. While these waivers may be broad enough to cover day-to-day activities at the school and even short trips within the school's local commuting area, a general activity waiver will not have identified the specific risks associated with more significant student travel. Thus, it is best to require a separate parental authorization and release for more significant trips, including trips with an overnight component, trips requiring long-distance travel, trips involving high-risk activities, and trips abroad.

Crisis Management

As the purpose of a risk management plan is to mitigate risks associated with student trips and travel, a key component of this plan is outlining the procedures for responding to certain emergencies, with the flexibility to deviate as needed.

While all trips pose different types of risks, the risk management plan should identify common emergencies that may arise during school trips and describe steps that trip leaders should take to address the situation and mitigate the risk of harm to trip participants. General emergencies that may arise during school-sponsored trips may include students falling ill, motor vehicle accidents, missing students, mental illness concerns, addressing students with suicidal ideations, sexual assault, storms, natural disasters, and terrorist activity.

For these situations, the risk management plan should identify an on-call team comprising school leadership that is expected to be on call and responsible for providing assistance from home. The risk management plan should also set forth a communication protocol for trip leaders to follow to notify the on-call team, and the order of communication. The school should also designate one member of the on-call team as the family liaison, who is responsible for communicating directly with families regarding emergent situations. Finally, the risk management plan should establish protocols for communicating with the media and should designate the individual(s) responsible for communicating with the media.

After any crisis situation, schools should commit to documenting the details of the situation, including any and all actions that the school took in responding to the emergency. Schools should also commit to a post-crisis debrief to evaluate the school's response and identify what, if anything, the school could have done better, so that the school's crisis management protocol can be improved for future situations.

Post-Trip Evaluation

One final component of a risk management plan for school-sponsored travel is a post-trip evaluation. Procedures should be developed to collect feedback from participants, chaperones, and school administrators regarding the success/shortcomings of various aspects of each trip, including the following:

• How prepared they felt the trip leaders were
• Whether they experienced any problems related to their health or safety during the trip and
• Overall impressions of the trip

Similarly, the trip leader and other faculty and staff attending the trip should provide feedback regarding the planning process, as well as the location, vendors, accommodations, and services utilized during the trip, to be considered when planning future trips.