If you want to get people worked up, the issue of 8th grade class trips will do it.
The subject of where to go on the eighth-grade class trip has become a hot one this spring in Oak Park. The official District 97 sponsored trip was to Nashville. But there is some upset because Holly Spurlock, an Oak Park District 97 school board member, helped organize an unofficial trip to D.C. in March that took 49 District 97 eighth graders and eight Ascension School eighth graders to Washington, D.C. for a four day trip that featured visits to Congress, the United State Holocaust Museum, the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, memorials and other important sites.
The trip largely mirrored an official District 97 trip in 2023 and unofficial ones that were taken by many District 97 eighth graders over the years.
Spurlock, who said she supports an official District 97 eighth grade class trip to D.C., said she heard an Ascension School parent was organizing a trip for 8th graders to D.C. and she got involved in it as parent because she is the mother of an 8th grader at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School. She wanted her son to have the same experience that her daughter had a few years ago.
“I think we’re in a crisis of democracy right now and it’s important to me that we send our kids out in the world with the D.C. experience,” Spurlock said.
Spurlock said her role on the trip was as parent, not a school board member.
However, in a public comment at the March 24 District 97 school board meeting parent Courtney DePinto harshly criticized Spurlock for helping organize an unofficial trip to D.C. for eighth graders. DePinto said the private trip was exclusionary and that not all eight graders and their families knew about it.
“She did not include everyone, not even everyone who could afford to pay,” DePinto said during her public comment at the meeting.
DePinto accused Spurlock of participating in a “mean girl mom dynamic”.
“My son, who wants to be a constitutional lawyer, he sees Barack Obama and Jamie Raskin as heroes, didn’t get to go to D.C. and was othered and not part of everyone,” DePinto said.
Spurlock said she did her best to publicize the trip and no one was excluded.
“It was word of mouth but it definitely was not exclusive,” Spurlock said. “I put it on the Brooks (Facebook) page and I had someone put it on the Julian page, if anyone wants to go to D.C. instead of Nashville contact Holly Spurlock. We had a Power Point, we had a parent meeting.”
The trip cost $1,900 per student. Spurlock said a couple of families got modest, perhaps $500, in financial support from the Close Up Foundation which ran the trip.
At the March 24 board meeting Jung Kim, a school board member, vented about the attack on Spurlock and the tone of the discussion about the class trip and the school board in general on Facebook.
“I am so fed up about the way this board is talked about in the community,” Kim said. “I’m just going to put it out there. We are treated and spoken about as if we are idiots, as if we hate children, as if we hate students, as if we hate teachers, that we make these decisions in a vacuum.”
“I feel like it’s getting worse and people talk about us like we are not human beings,” Kim said. “We just had public comment talking about us being immoral or evil or whatever and I am done with that.”
The official eighth grade class trip in District 97 this year was a three-day bus trip to Nashville in March. The trip was optional and 212 eighth graders, or 35 percent of the eighth grade class, went on the trip. The cost of the Nashville trip was $1,059 and the district waived the fee for students who qualify for free and reduced price lunch. Last fall eighth graders voted to go to Nashville over a trip to Springfield and St. Louis that the previous class took. Three hundred-plus eighth graders, 53 percent of that year’s eighth graders, went on the 2025 trip to Springfield and St. Louis.
For the last two years District 97 has chosen to focus on a bus accessible eighth grade class trip in order to increase affordability and promote equity. The district covered the cost for 56 of the students on this year’s Nashville trip in March.
“By prioritizing equitable access, the district has increased participation among the priority groups named in our equity policy—specifically Black and Brown students, those eligible for free and reduced price lunch, and students with disabilities,” said Amanda Siegfried, the district spokesperson, in an email. “These rates now match or exceed their representation across the entire eighth-grade class.
A group of parents are asking District 97 to again sponsor an eighth grade class trip to Washington, D.C.
“We want to create equity so, I think really, the only option for everyone is to have the trip go to D.C. because if you do have the trip go to D.C. you get a great number of kids who go there, this will lower costs,” said Bob Pickrell in his public comment at the March 24 board meeting.
Lisa Peloquin, the mother of a seventh grader, spoke at the April 14 school board meeting advocating for next year’s eighth grade class trip to go to Washington, D.C. She said the district should make sure that all eighth graders can go to D.C.
“All of our students should stand in the footsteps where a million men marched, see their rights outlined in the Bill of Rights, and witness the devastating human cost of a war a government lied to its people about,” Peloquin said. “Given the antidemocratic tendencies of our current administration, equity demands that every student knows how to make sure their voice is heard. The truth is that all of our children deserve to be inspired by a trip to our nation’s capital. If the district decided not to go to D.C. then only some of our students will have that experience. This path might be easier, but let’s not kid ourselves and call it equity.”
Peloquin coined a new word, schmequity, to describe something that looks like equity from a distance but under close examination is not equitable. That’s how she described the trips to Springfield/St. Louis and Nashville.
Peloquin and some other parents have already begun fundraising to help pay for the costs of a D.C. trip for families that can’t afford to pay the full price. Brooks and Julian Middle School students will go on a fundraising walk between their two schools after school on Friday, May 8 to raise money.
“Reject shmequity arguments and push the district leadership to commit to ensure all of our children have access to the government,” Peloquin told the school board. “This should be a community wide effort, and the district should be leading it. And, finally, I urge you to increase the funding the district allocates for this trip. It’s the equitable thing to do.”
In the board discussion at the March 24 meeting board member Venus Hurd Johnson said that she supports the concept of the district trip to D.C.
“I do like the idea of a D.C. trip,” Hurd Johnson said. “Both of my children did make an extraordinary expensive D.C. trip when they were in D97 and for me I remember doing it when I was in eighth grade,” Hurd Johnson said.
The District 97 administration will give a report at the May 12 school board about eighth grade trips. The district is already gathering input from parents and students as it prepares to present possible destinations to eighth graders next fall for a vote.