Recent laws are forcing us to rethink how schools pay for “extra” educational activities. Here’s an excerpt from CA Assembly Bill 165, amended in Assembly on May 5, 2011: “This bill would prohibit a school district, school, or other entity…from imposing a pupil fee, as defined, for participation in educational activities…”

Note: this bill has since been vetoed. Read more here. 

How does this affect Outdoor Education?

In the case of Outdoor Education, your school can prevent a student from attending because of poor behavior or low grades. Your school cannot prevent a student from attending because of an inability to pay. CA Assembly Bill 165 subjects your school or district to penalties and fines if you require a student to pay a fee in order to attend an educational activity. Your Outdoor Education experience must be provided to all of your students free of any fees.

So how do we pay for Outdoor Education?

Here’s another excerpt from CA Assembly Bill 165: “The bill…is not to be interpreted to prohibit solicitation of voluntary donations, voluntary participation in fundraising activities, or school districts and schools from providing pupils prizes or other recognition for voluntarily participating in fundraising activities.” In effect, AB 165 does not prevent schools from fundraising through voluntary donations. Here’s an example of a proper way to raise money for your Outdoor Education experience:

“The sixth graders from our elementary school will be attending High Trails Outdoor Science School for a 5 day field trip. For all of our students to participate, we need to raise $ _____; this comes out to $ _____ per student. To pay for this experience, our elementary school will be fundraising  and accepting voluntary donations. Our deadline to raise this amount of money is _____. If we meet our goal all students will be eligible to attend High Trails. If we do not meet our goal all voluntary donations will be returned to the parents and fundraiser amounts will be used for future student educational activities.”

The wording here is what is important; you can solicit, or ask, for voluntary donations and for help fundraising. You can’t hint, imply, or otherwise indicate that you might require it.

Band Together

Schools can’t get around California laws like this one that disallow individual pupil fees for educational activities. You can, though, still involve parents in raising funds. Take the time to let them know the value of Outdoor Education, and then let them know what it takes for all of your students to have this invaluable experience. You just might find that parents understand the situation, chip in with voluntary donations as they are able, and even help more enthusiastically with local fundraising.

The glass half full tells us that this new CA Assembly Bill (which is really just a reinforcement of the Hartzell ruling in 1980) truly forces us to look at who gets to experience the wonder and beauty of nature during an Outdoor Education trip. It should never be who; it should be all.

Want to learn how to fundraise for your school? Check these ideas out!

At High Trails Outdoor Science School, we literally force our instructors to write about elementary outdoor education, teaching outside, learning outside, our dirty classroom (the forest…gosh), environmental science, outdoor science, and all other tree hugging student and kid loving things that keep us engaged, passionate, driven, loving our job, digging our life, and spreading the word to anyone whose attention we can hold for long enough to actually make it through reading this entire sentence. Whew…. www.dirtyclassroom.com