A group of South Newton students, parents and teachers are heading to Europe over spring break.
The group leaves March 22 and will return March 31.
Emily Peregrine, a South Newton teacher, has organized the trip. They will be going to explore historic World War II and Cold War sites.
“I take our seventh and eighth graders to Washington, D.C., every other year,” she said. “It’s the same company. They had sent me an email about two years ago to fill out a survey. They had brought up international travel. A group of students I had taught in the seventh and eighth grade honors class, where we cover the 1940s unit. We’d always talked about going to Auschwitz. It’s something that interests the group of us.”
She said the company, World Strides, reached out and asked if there was a specific international trip she was thinking of and the plans started to materialize from there.
The group will spend two days in Berlin and Dresden in Germany, Prague in Czech Republic, Krakow in Poland, and Auschwitz.
She said the travel company has helped make the trip planning easy.
“I had a parent meeting,” she said, noting that about 30 to 45 people attend and others reached out. There are 13 people now going.
There are five students going and each has a parent going along, and the others are from the district. There are two freshmen, two sophomores and one junior going on the trip.
Peregrine said the trip should be memorable for the group.
“We start in Berlin at the Berlin Wall and we kind of dig into the history of the Cold War and the political changes and the changes that have happened in German. That’s something that is taught here in World History, so I hope they are going to get a better understanding and realize that it really did happen and there are things in history that continue to happen and hopefully as long as we know our history we won’t make the same mistakes.”
The students are very excited, she said. Three of the five students were in the middle school class that studied the 1940s.
“We do a very deep dive into the Holocaust,” she said, noting that they studied the books Maus, Anne Frank, Hiroshima and The Book Thief.
“We dig deep into the literature and make connections,” she said, explaining that the students do a lot of research. She said the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., will send teachers identification cards if they are contacted.
“When you walk in (to the museum when you visit), you are given an identification card. That identification card is a real person and it tells you their story. It’s a four story building. You go in an elevator to the top floor. The elevator simulates what the railroad cars were back then. Each floor you walk down and go through. Each floor correlates to a page in your identification card. At the end, on the back of the identification card it tells you if you are someone who survived or who perished.”
She said if you contact the museum, they will send identification cards for the class. “Our kids do a whole research project based on individuals who are there. It’s a great learning opportunity to teach them they way things were back then and some of that still lingers and how can we make it better. How can we change to make the world better, make our lives better and be better humans.
“I’m hoping that they’ll be able to make those connections and grow and be able to come back to Newton County and continue to make Newton County better,” she said.
She said they have talked about doing an international trip every four years. “I want people to know that while it is expensive, it’s something that I hope a lot of our students will be able to be part of and to experience other places.
The students raised the money for the trip. Last summer they worked a day at Miss Piggy’s at the fairgrounds. One of the students, Elianna Holloway, created artwork to sell at the Young Entrepreneur Day. World Strides also offers scholarships that can be apply for. The company also creates an educational fund type page to help students raise money for their trips.
Peregrine is the media specialist for South Newton and also teaches seventh and eighth citizenship and high school broadcasting pathways.
