Sallie B. Howard, a native of Wilson and a black schoolteacher, was once stopped at the border of Saddam-era Iraq. The guards demanded to know why she was trying to enter the country without a visa. Undeterred, she explained she wanted to see the Hanging Gardens of Babylon; she had made several journeys to visit the Seven Wonders of the World, and this was next on her list. She managed to talk her way in.
The Wilson charter school that bears her name has adopted some of her philosophy and boldness as its own. From its inception in 1997, Sallie B. Howard School of the Arts and Education, one of the first charter schools in North Carolina, has placed educational travel as the centerpiece of its programs. Study from books and audiovisual resources is useful, but it is an entirely different matter to actually walk in the land and be among its people, said the school’s principal, Dr. JoAnne Woodard.
“This is one of the components of the school, one of its pillars,” said Dr. Woodard. “It isn’t a second thought; it’s part of the school’s budget. That’s why we only do it every other year, to keep a balanced budget.”
While other schools may sponsor trips to Florida, New York City, or even a senior cruise for their high school students, Sallie B. Howard School just took 10 middle-school students and six chaperones 7,000 miles to China.
The school serves a largely disadvantaged population of more than 600 students. About 60 percent are black, and most of the rest are Hispanic. “Just a smattering of students are white,” Woodard said, and 90 percent receive free or reduced lunch.
That makes these trips even more remarkable. That’s the point of them.
“In other schools, most of the children come with some sense of their own value, and a sense of their future. They bring that from their families. You may take it for granted, but for the most part, our kids don’t have that. We’re a school of choice, and our students are here because they have not done well in the other schools.
“Our task is to convince these children that they have a future. The real motive of the study-abroad program is to get these kids to enlarge their scope of what’s possible,” she said. Alumni of earlier trips have found the confidence to succeed in college or prestigious boarding schools after the experience.
The school picks up the entire cost for the students. The adults pay their own way. A former teacher who owns an import business and has family and associates in many nations helps make arrangements that stretch the school’s travel budget.
Dr. Woodard said that space on the trip is reserved for the top 10 entrants in the research project on the target country, and it does not automatically go to the honor roll students. “The judges read the projects ‘blind’, and it’s not just the A and B students who make it in,” she said. “I like that aspect of it. The ones who get to go are the ones who really, really wanted to go.”
The recent 16-day trip was not the school’s first; that was a three-country visit to Kenya, Tanzania, and Egypt in 2000. That trip was also the longest, at 30 days. But compared to previous visits to Mexico and India, this was the most exotic.
“The China trip went far beyond anything we’ve experienced,” she said. While other journeys were in countries where English is commonly spoken, in China, there was no way to even read the street signs. “This was the most fantastic trip we’ve taken; it was a really strange land.”
The students flew in to Beijing and traveled more than 2,000 miles by chartered bus, overnight train, and internal Chinese airlines to visit Shanghai and Xi’an. The train was something of a trial, Woodard said, because Americans didn’t fit well into the narrow, three-berth sleepers used on Chinese railways. The crowding on the trains took its toll on other conveniences too, so they opted to return by plane on that trip.
However, she said the students and the Chinese took to each other very well. Dr. Woodard said that wherever they went, they attracted crowds of interested Chinese. “We’d stop to visit a rest room and when we came out, people were lined up taking pictures with the students who waited outside. I think they were fascinated with all these dark-skinned people.” She observed that their interpreter was actually a native of Cameroon who had learned Chinese as a student there, an interesting crossing of cultures.
The young people were undaunted by the unfamiliar food — or eating with chopsticks. That surprised even Dr. Woodard. Students on earlier trips have sometimes been finicky about the food, but, she said, this group enjoyed the Chinese and Indian cuisine they sampled.
While in Beijing they took part in an open meeting for local people and students to practice their English. The children were an instant hit, and Dr. Woodard said she was interested at the freedom that many showed in speaking about Mao Zedong and even the Tian’anmen Square incident. “It did not meet our expectation of what Communist China was supposed to look like,” she said. “We didn’t feel any repression from the people.”
The group stayed in the dormitories of the high school at East China University in Shanghai and took part in activities at a nearby school. “We always take time with like-aged children and their schools. That’s where relationships are formed. In fact, the group we met in India brought a group of about 20 to see our school in Wilson the following spring.”
The next trip, in 2008, is planned for Europe. That will probably be longer, she said, because they will want to see as many countries as possible. “We’re not limited to where we go or how long we stay, so we take as much time as we need for each trip,” Dr. Woodard said. “We never know that we will return to a place.”
Hal Young is a contributing editor of Carolina Journal.