Trip to Washington D.C. to Visit the Holocaust Museum and the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial

Satellite Academy is an alternative high school on the Lower East Side that was one of the first alternative high schools in the country. We have an excellent track record educating young people who have not been successful in traditional high schools. Our student population is African-American and Hispanic. All of our students receive free lunch and breakfast. Many of our female students are young mothers. We have a daycare center on site to service them. We teach 10th-12th graders in a Humanities class called Facing History and Ourselves. In this class, we use the Holocaust as a case study to discuss issues of race, prejudice, discrimination and obedience to authority. We ask students to examine their own behaviors and experiences to make connections between the history we study and their own lives. Ultimately, our goal is for students to understand that they are history makers and the choices they make do make a difference. We hope they make choices that make a better world. In 2002 and 2003, we got generous donations from DonorsChoose to take our students for a day trip to Washington, D.C. primarily to visit the Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. It was a very successful trip. We had many conversations afterwards about how to remember and honor human tragedies. Students created their own memorials in clay and we set up a mini-museum in our art room for the rest of the school to visit. Students from the class wrote meaning statements to help explain their works of art. We would like the opportunity to do the same trip. We were surprised that most of our students had never been out of New York State. You can imagine their excitement as our bus stopped in front of the White House, the Lincoln Memorial, the Capital building. They were beaming. The Holocaust Memorial Museum is a powerful tool in teaching this history. Even the architecture of the building is evocative. To walk through actual cattle cars and bunkers, to see the faces of the victims and to hear their words, and to see the legacy left by the thousands of victims' shoes in a remarkable exhibit, is something that cannot be experienced in the classroom. Thanks for reading our proposal!