En route pour Paris!

MANAWA – Half of the senior class at Little Wolf High School will be taking a trip to Paris, and the teacher in charge of organizing the trips has gotten the go ahead to continue planning for future trips.
Ryan Peterson, the district administrator for the Manawa School District, said travel for any grades halted once Covid hit. Recently a teacher came to him and asked if they could start offering a travel option for high school seniors.
That teacher was Jeff Bortle who said he chose Paris for the first travel offering because it was short notice and he had been to Paris in the past and was familiar with the sites to see and the city in general.
Once Bortle and Peterson got the go ahead from the Manawa School Board, Bortle began researching pricing and getting information out to students and parents.
Bortle said 46 people, a mix of parents and students, will be going on the trip.

They will go on a Seine River cruise, take an Eiffel Tower tour, tour the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, visit Notre Dame Cathedral, tour Versailles and tour Musee du Louver.
Bortle said this trip was planned quickly and on somewhat short notice, so when he came to the school board meeting on Jan. 27 it was in hopes to get approval to start planning future travel offerings for seniors in an effort to allow the students to start saving money.
Peterson said once parents found out about the Paris offering they began emailing and asking about whether or not they would have the same offering when their children reached senior status.
“I am incredibly supportive of the opportunities that kids have to get outside of central Wisconsin and see some of the rest of our country and the rest of the world,” said Peterson. “I mean, these are a once in a lifetime trips for a lot of people that may never get this opportunity again and to be able to allow them to travel overseas and immerse themselves in a different culture, I think is incredibly valuable.”
Bortle agrees that this offering can be such a valuable experience for students. “I want to open up students’ minds to travel and seeing other parts of the world and their cultures,” said Bortle. “I waited way too long in life to travel and I want my students to see that trips like this can be reasonable and aren’t out of the question for them to do on their own in the future.”
Bortle said he is open to going where students and parents would like to go as long as he feels comfortable with the location.