Jean Fritz Pierre, 16, of Brooklyn, drowned June 25 in Hessian Lake, after breaking off from his classmates during a field trip approved by the New York City public schools, the New York Post reports.
Chancellor Dennis Walcott said a total of five chaperons were assigned to 48 students from New York’s International High School on the nature hike. “It’s totally wrong to think there wasn’t supervision there. There was the proper staff-student ratio,” the paper quoted him as saying, but he has since referred the case to the special commissioner of investigation.
One student quoted in the article said she and a small group of friends were told to make their way back to the trail unsupervised, leading me to question whether this was actually the appropriate level of supervision, given the behavior of the chaperons. It’s not so much the student:staff ratio I’m questioning; I’m concerned about the level of supervision provided by the five chaperons that were on the trip.
I mean, if one student was in Hessian Lake, which is off-limits to swimmers, long enough to drown and another group of students got lost in the woods for a few hours making their way back to the trail, the chaperons obviously weren’t doing a very good job of chaperoning. If that’s because there were too few of them, then the commissioner needs to revise the student:staff ratio for field trips to locations like this. If it happened because the chaperons weren’t taught their duties, the policies for selection and training of chaperons need to be examined.
This is the second death on a field trip for New York’s public school students in three years. Nicole Suriel, 12, drowned in June 2010 during a class field trip to Long Beach. In that case, many questions were raised as to the permission slips signed by students’ parents, the New York Times reported.
I question, a little bit, the student:chaperon ratio of 48:5 (9.6 students per chaperon). “Larger groups were often lumped together to create activity groups of 15 or more students and two or more chaperones [5 or 7.5 students per chaperon],” wrote Jonathan Zvi Boxerman for his PhD thesis in Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University, describing a field trip into the field for a study of nature, here.
However, I don’t expect the New York school chancellor will be much in the mood for considering the body of research in this field or of listening to common sense. Jean’s death was ruled an accident by the medical examiner, and there will surely be an investigation to keep Mr Walcott’s hands full. In the meantime, though, in your own school, please consider the research on the appropriate level of student supervision and the appropriate training for those supervisors on trips into the woods.
