SCHOOL TRIP RUINED

A letter from one teacher sums up the waste of years of planning and fundraising by students, and also the feeling of being brushed off when the school complained about events at the Vimy memorial. (The names of the teacher, school and school board were deleted.)

The school planned for 21/2 years to send a contingent of 100 students and supervisors. The students paid $3,500 each for the trip. They put in a year of weekly night classes, learned about individual soldiers who died, visited Passchendaele and other battlegrounds.

Teachers had prepared in incredible detail, outlining movements of each of the four Canadian divisions, the letter said.

“We were hoping to point out where the Canadians exploded from their lines as they made their way up the ridge, fighting in a sleet storm, under a rolling barrage against strong German defences. We wanted to point out the Pimple where the German resistance was deadly. We wanted to highlight the Douai Plain that became the objective of the Canadian assault.

“In the minimum, we were hoping to get just a visual of what the ridge would have looked like to Canadian soldiers . ... We got none of this.”

The students, who had been promised a chance to walk up the ridge where the soldiers walked, were instead shunted onto a roadside for three hours.

“A whole year’s worth of work was reduced to a roadside presentation in a farmer’s field,” the letter said. Later, during the ceremony, they could see neither the stage nor the TV screen.

It got worse. When the teacher wrote to Veterans Affairs, someone at the department replied that the school’s feedback “will be taken into consideration when planning future events.” The response seemed to have rubbed salt in a wound.

“That does absolutely zero for us,” the teacher replied. “You are telling us that we should be grateful that our poor experience that was largely the fault of Veterans Affairs will be useful for future events? What about us? What do we get outside of two and a half years of anticipation that led to a massive disappointment only made worse by this response? This was beyond a once-in-a-lifetime event. It will never happen again.”

The teacher suggested sending the students to another commemorative event in future.