socaliforniamagistra

Posted on 10/19/09

Why was New Century disallowed by your committee? That was a
very provocative statement.

While I am now happily traveling with LEAD Discovery USA out
of San Diego, my district has a number of student tour
companies that are acceptable to them. These companies may
not offer the stipends etc. to teachers or administrators
(neither can we solicit or accept these perks beyond a free
trip and reimbursement of expenses given directly through our
school board.) and I think the respective companies have to
add us to their liability insurance. For a district
to 'disallow' a company rather than to have simply chosen one
company over another, is interesting.

I traveled with New Century once, and while they were nice
people, they did not provide the 24-hour teaching tour guide
or had as much educational content or activities as I wanted,
We had a lot of fast food (I have since banned food vouchers
at food courts from all my trips!). They seemed to follow the
same itineraries and overall style as Worldstrides, although
the hotels were better and closer to DC. (I wondered if the
two companies were ever related.)

On 10/18/09, Philip Read wrote:
> I hworked with New Century from their inception in 1990
> until mey retirement in 1998. There was never a problem
> that was not immediately taken care of. On one trip we had
> a student cut his head at the capitol builoding. New
> Century provided an ambulance and had us takedn to the
> hospital where he had staples used to close it up. On
> numerous occasions we have hd sick students and these were
> provided transportation to the hotel with one of the
> chaperones. If you choose good chaperones then you will
> not have many problems thatg can not be taken care of. My
> wife and I worked with the owners of tghe companyfor about
> 27 years, leaving another company when they started up and
> were never disappointed. You could not find more caring
> people than those who founded the company. I find it
> difficult to hear of these incidents and find much validity
> to them. The only reason my former school system left is
> because the school committee disallowed them.

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