There are a lot of people around town who schedule field trips for homeschool groups, including myself. I hope to talk with some of them for future posts. Meanwhile, I'll open up this blog with something I personally know well.
In 2009, I opened up a group called Just Field Trips. (I actually have another blog of the same name, where I give reviews of the field trips we go on). At the time, I was part of a local homeschool group that wasn't doing very many field trips. Getting a field trip on the calendar through them was difficult. Also, those field trips ended up only being available to members of that group. I have friends all over the Valley that I'd ideally like to include! So, that led me to founding Just Field Trips.
The idea was a hit. We started on Yahoo Groups, and membership swelled to over 300 families! We had a lot of growing pains on Yahoo Groups. I found keeping track of which field trips were upcoming and RSVPs for all of those incredibly difficult. We moved to NING, which worked well until NING decided to charge. We moved again to our current home on Facebook, where we now have almost 250 families. I keep encouraging our members to recommend the group to their homeschooling friends. I'd like to see the group continue growing. My theory is that the more members we have, the more opportunities all of our kids will have!
While other members do occasionally step in and schedule field trips that they are interested in, I am the principle scheduler and coordinator for that group. I'm a volunteer; I don't get paid to do it. There are no membership fees for joining Just Field Trips. I schedule and coordinate field trips to locations that I want to take my kids anyway. I'd never schedule or coordinate something that I didn't want to do myself. I generally schedule two field trips per month, and always on days and times that are convenient for me.
We had some issues come up where members of an attachment parenting group who had friends who were homeschooling were wanting to join, and I had to make a tough call. The purpose of the group was for active homeschoolers who have at least one child of school-age to band together to create enough numbers to qualify for school field trip or group rates. I was taking membership requests from people whose oldest children weren't even out of diapers! I steered them toward MOMS Clubs and MOPS groups as gently as I could, telling them to find us again when their oldest child reached school-age.
That was a tough call to make, because many of our members (myself included) have younger children as well, and homeschooling families tend to do things all together or not at all. At no time, unless the location itself has age limits, have we told families that older or younger siblings were not allowed to come on the field trips. The difference I see between my 2-year-old and the 2 or 3-year-old oldest child of someone who isn't yet homeschooling is that I also have a 12-year-old and a 9-year-old. I'm scheduling field trips for children in the 7-13 age category. As someone who has children in that group, I have a vested interest in making sure that my 2-year-old isn't disruptive to the field trip. Experience has shown me that folks who aren't also homeschooling school-aged children are less likely to remove a disruptive child from the situation.
Each upcoming field trip has its own page. Members get invitations to each field trip and they RSVP there and get all of the pertinent information. It also has a main wall for disseminating other information. Since this is not a homeschool support group, there is little dialogue on our main wall. The only thing we do together is field trips - hence, our name!
