The Tornado Travelers Club is one of the newer clubs here at Malden High that allows students to travel to different countries around the world with their fellow students.
Run by Sarah Jones and Shauna Campbell, this club helps to centralize all of the long-distance trips that teachers want to go on and creates a schedule of events over four or five years. This helps students decide on and prepare for a trip that they would like to go on which gives their families time to gather the funds before the trip actually happens. Even families of eighth graders can start to plan for a trip that will take place when their children are in their junior year of high school.
Shauna Campbell, a science teacher at MHS, became the co-leader of the club because she feels that exposing students to traveling experiences is “one of the ultimate learning opportunities you can have when you fully jump into the unknown.” Traveling creates priceless memories that will form friendships and decisions that will come later in the future. One of Campbell’s favorite quotes about travel is, ” Travel is the only thing that you can buy that makes you richer.”
Sarah Jones, a math teacher at MHS, enjoys being with students as they experience things that they would never have access to in Malden. Students who sign up can be exposed to new cultures, activities, foods, and things outside their comfort zone. Because the Travelers Club is fairly new, Jones has only been on one trip to Costa Rica with the club members. The people who went on the trip still reminisce about their trip and the whole school even got a feel for their excitement. Jones believes that traveling is a “life-changing experience, a thing that you’re actually going to remember from high school as opposed to what we did yesterday in math class.”
The club’s goals are to get a four year schedule created so that students who enter the high school have four years of trips available to them to choose. During club meetings, they discuss what the trip is, what they will do on the trip, and how to sign up. Once everyone signs up, they discuss the location of the trip, how to prepare to leave for the trip, and the necessary items to take to that country.
