For most students, “Cookies” courses were limited to May 4-5, and they offered opportunities for students to interact with Chicago and with their teachers through student-planned curricula. This was not the case for three groups totalling 52 students, who traveled with three separate departments around the country and even across the Atlantic.

These trips took students touring historic Civil Rights landmarks, singing in old cathedrals on the Italian coast, and seeing the 70 million year old wonder that is the Grand Canyon. All 52 students had filled out planned absence forms, attended meetings about their trips, packed their bags carefully and thoroughly, and agreed to spend hours and hours in airport and on flights–all for the learning of new cultures, ways of life, and pieces of history, and the creation of a memorable experience.

On May 3, 19 students met at O’Hare airport to board a 7:15am flight to Las Vegas, Nevada. Upon arriving, the trip’s faculty heads, upper school Science teachers Bridget Lesinski and Leslie Webster, took the students to visit geologically and environmentally notable areas, such as the Red Rock Conservation area and the Hoover Dam, before setting off to Arizona to stay in the Grand Canyon.

Science teachers at Parker are becoming more concerned about climate change, according to Lesinski given the new political atmosphere, which is concerningly skeptic of the proven facts of human-caused climate change. “We’re hoping that the students will get an appreciation for the interconnectedness of all life,” Lesinski said, “and how fragile ecosystems are, so that we grow additional environmental scientists.”

At Red Rock students climbed through a large canyon and over boulders in the rocky landscape, and ended up climbing about 200 feet in the air. The students spent the next day journeying into the Grand Canyon, and the next 3 nights and 3 and a half days trekking across its massive area through different paths and climbing areas, where they needed at least four points of contact on the rock to be safe.

“Even though I haven’t had a lot of previous camping experience, this will be something new to do,” freshman Caroline Conforti said prior to the trip. “I will become a lot more confident with my camping skills.”

The group also swam in scenic waterfalls in the area to get a break from the endlessly dry and hot climate of the canyon.

Students also got to interact with the Havasupai tribe that lives at the Havasupai Reservation in the canyon, and to learn about their culture. “It was definitely eye-opening,” said freshman Kushmir Onisemoh. “I didn’t think that people could live inside of a canyon with barely any internet and spotty wifi.”

Unfortunately, the Las Vegas airport cancelled the group’s return flight because of a problem with Spirit Airlines, so they had to take a four-hour drive to the Phoenix airport. Lesinski and 4 other students arrived at O’Hare airport at 12:30, and the rest arrived with Webster at Midway about an hour later from another connecting flight. Despite the confusion and tiredness of the group, they arrived back in Chicago, with a story to tell and an unforgettable trip.

Meanwhile another group of students was participating in a choir event held in an old region of Italy.  Sixteen students in Special Choir traveled to  Cattolica, Italy with Music Teacher and Department Co- Chair Sunnie Hikawa and Music Teacher Robert Denien to take part in the Queen of the Adriatic Sea Choral Festival and Competition.

“We decided we wanted to go on a wider stage into a bigger community,” Hikawa said, “to create music, to create art with other groups, and also to bring our own music to perform in other places.”

The students got to O’Hare in the early afternoon to get on an afternoon flight, and after hours of flying arrived in Cattolica on May 4. The next day students visited San Leo, Italy in the morning, and got to see the old architecture, and explore it with their classmates.

Junior and Special Choir Student Maya Plotnick explained why she was so thrilled with being able to go on this trip. “There’s never really anything,” she said, “where we’re traveling for hours and meeting people from all over the world.”

The choir competition against three other school choirs from around the world, coming from Russia and Indonesia, took place on May 6.  The challenge was to perform a 15 minute set of music with which they were competing against those of the other student choirs.

Senior Austin O’Toole reflected on the group’s preparation and performance. “It was definitely hard, like memorizing all the songs in a short period of time, and like memorizing the dances and everything,” said O’Toole, “but I thought we did a great job.”

On the final day, the students sang with the other school choirs during mass at an old Italian church, and then took a tour of the Italian coastal city of Rimini, exploring the old churches there and seeing the centuries-old buildings and the rich culture of medieval Italian society. They then flew back to Amsterdam that night, and landed back in Chicago on the 8th.

Meanwhile the third group was taking a trip down south to learn from civil rights legends and landmarks and to become educated up close on the rich culture of the region. Upper school History teacher and Department Co-Chair Andrew Bigelow and upper school English teacher and Department Co-Chair Theresa Collins took 19 students on this trip to Memphis, Tennessee and Jackson, Mississippi. Last year Bigelow and Collins took a group of students down to Alabama and Memphis to see civil rights landmarks in those two cities, marking the sixth trip of this kind that the history department has taken in the recent past.

Bigelow reflected on how this trip can have a big impact on the students because of the exposure to all this crucial history. “It kind of opens their eyes and makes injustice real,” Bigelow said. “The idea is to see the history of social justice in America, and it gets them to kind of question and think about our history, and where are we today, and how far have we come.”

The students arrived in Memphis on Wednesday, May 3. Not wasting any time, they took a Riverboat tour along the river before having dinner at Gus’s Famous Fried Chicken, and exploring the Beale Street, an iconic street for Memphis culture and American–especially blues–music. The next morning, the group traveled over to the Mississippi Delta, where they met with Civil Rights Veteran Charles “Mac” MacLaurin.

MacLaurin spent the entire day with the group, taking them around some of the notable civil rights monuments, including Fannie Lou Hamer’s gravesite and memorial, and provided students with his testimony of fighting for the rights of African Americans.“He gave us a lot of knowledge about what was going on at that time,” junior Olivia Levine said, “and why he had the courage to go through the entire civil rights movement.”

On their final day, the group traveled back to Memphis, where they finished off their trip by going to the iconic national civil rights museum at the Lorraine Motel, built around the spot where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. “I think learning about it and seeing all the history in a timeline was particularly helpful to understand the movement,” Levine said, “because the museum went in a chronological order by what was happening during each time.”

Three trips, three regions of the world, three groups of students, dozens of facts learned–and taken back to the Parker community.