Many schools offer international opportunities for students: trips embedded into academic courses; spring-break adventures; service learning or language immersion trips, etc. The nature and goals of these trips are important when choosing location, duration, and participants. Risk management is a pressing topic as the CDC and WHO share worrisome information about mosquito borne diseases. I’m of course thinking of the Zika outbreak. Dengue and Chikungunya also have and continue to cause serious havoc in many countries now affected by Zika.
When do you cancel a trip due to potential health risks? How do you prepare students and parents? Excellent questions but also very complex. Canceling a trip that’s already planned and paid for is never an easy decision though sometimes it’s the only right one. And it’s messy.
Students are disappointed. Parents are relieved that they, at least this time, didn’t have to be the nay-sayer. Cancelling a trip often has enormous consequences for an overseas partner organization and/or host families who were counting on the small but important extra income. These people often put a lot of time and effort into preparing for our students’ arrival and time on site.
This Zika outbreak reminds me of the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2013. It, too, was described as a global health crisis, and many, many West Africans lost beloved family members. The immediate Ebola crisis may be over, but communities are still dealing with the effects. My school cancelled a trip to Senegal in the very early stages of the Ebola outbreak. Now we have to reconsider our trips to Ecuador, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, if not other locations as well. Do the health risks currently associated with Zika outweigh the goals of the student trips?
This is a good time for administrators of global programs to revisit decision-processes and procedures. Who are the decision-makers when it comes to cancelling a trip? Who are the stakeholders? What are the school’s liabilities? What is the school board comfortable with? Who needs to be informed? What kind of back-up plans can we make and are we comfortable with? Who can we talk with? What’s the potential impact on our global partners? The list of questions should be long and thorough.
It’s been helpful for me to have conversation with colleagues from other independent schools and also follow how colleges and universities have reacted to the current global health crisis. It’s been reassuring to learn that independent international travel and study abroad seem to be basically unaffected, so far. People are still traveling abroad. Which leads me to my final questions: how can we use this global health crisis as a learning opportunity for our students to unpack and understand the underlying causes of massive epidemics of mosquito borne diseases? If their trip isn’t cancelled, how can they use their eyes, ears and mind to learn more about why particular areas are hit worse than others, why is this a global issue, and why should we care? Suggestions are appreciated.