The Proven Way to Prepare Chaperones and Students for a Fun-Filled Spring Trip

It’s spring trip season for many booster clubs, and the key to fun-filled travel is forward planning. Before you hit the road, be sure that everyone is well prepared and knows what to expect. The best way to communicate your expectations is by meeting with your chaperones and travelers in advance.

Here are the key points for success in each of these meetings.

1. The chaperone meeting. Meet with your chaperones two to three weeks before your trip and tell them what to expect. Here you’ll share guidelines, rules, and expectations for travel.

The chaperone meeting gives them a chance to meet each other and exchange contact information. You’ll have the opportunity to answer questions and to make sure that everyone is “on the same page.” This is where you’ll share room, chaperone, and bus assignments with them. Occasionally, they will identify problem areas or suggest changes to the assignments. Always welcome their feedback and make every effort to implement their suggestions.

Three Key Assignments Every Thriving Booster Club Makes Before the Spring Trip

Spring is here, the time when many booster clubs take their students on an annual trip. When it comes to travel, a booster club’s role is to provide a safe, affordable, and fun experience for the students. By now, you’ve already scheduled your trip and registered your travelers, so it’s time to prepare for travel.

There are three key assignments when preparing to travel: assigning rooms, assigning chaperones, and assigning buses. Let’s take a look at each activity in detail:

1. Assigning rooms. Travel helps students build lasting friendships and create lifelong memories. A best practice from my experience is to allow students to choose their own roommates. You may simply post a sign-up sheet formatted in blocks, where each block represents a room. Divide each block into four sections for students to write in their names. Here’s an example:

Room Sign-up Sheet

Which Parent Are You?

Each year during the final home football game of the season, the Blaze Band recognizes its seniors and their parents for the students’ participation and dedication to the program. Each year, I never ceased to be amazed at how many parents I didn’t know. It was like, “who are you, and where have you been?” Remember, these were parents of seniors, not incoming freshmen, and I simply didn’t know them.

I realize that each family has its own unique challenges, commitments, and priorities. Life is full of “curve balls” that seem to hit us unexpectedly from out of the blue. However, I firmly believe that what gets prioritized gets done. I always left the stadium on senior night feeling as if many parents hadn’t prioritized their children’s activities and, subsequently, hadn’t participated in the booster club.

I contrast these parents against Steve, our Truck & Equipment Committee chair. Steve selflessly volunteered his time and developed one of the most thriving committees in the booster club. During his tenure, he grew the committee in numbers never before realized. He created a culture of acceptance, teamwork, and pride. Steve acted on the ideas and suggestions of his committee members, and achieved unprecedented accomplishments.

Seven Ways Your Employer Benefits When You Volunteer in a Booster Club

When counting the benefits of volunteering, you may immediately think of the value you provide to the booster club you’re serving. Expanding from there, you may easily quantify the benefits that you receive personally. But there’s another beneficiary of your volunteering that is rarely considered – your employer.

Volunteering with a booster club provides many opportunities to enhance and expand your skill set. Many of the skills you develop in a volunteer setting are immediately transferrable to your career. As your skill set grows, you are able to provide more value to your employer. Here are seven benefits that employers realize when you volunteer with a booster club.

Want to Improve Your Work-Life Balance? Volunteer With a Booster Club

Today’s communication technology allows us to stay connected to our work, and that often takes a toll on our work-life balance. When we’re away from the office, it’s easy to answer a call or two, reply to an email, and send a few texts. We like to tell ourselves we’re multi-tasking, but truth be known, we’re simply robbing the time away from our families.

29 - Work-Life Balance

You have an outstanding opportunity to improve your work-life balance by volunteering with your child’s booster club. Spring is a time of transition in the life of a booster club, when seniors – and their parents – graduate out. There will soon be many opportunities for you to plug-in and get involved.

Zig Ziglar illustrated his Wheel of Life with seven spokes coming from the hub. Each spoke represents an area of focus that we must maintain to achieve balance in life. The spokes are Personal, Family, Career, Physical, Mental, Spiritual, and Financial.

In the context of Zig’s seven spokes, you can significantly impact the Personal, Family, and even Physical spokes in your own wheel of life. Let’s get started.