During the 2024-2025 school year, in-person Class Trip and Class Visitor projects are unavailable. This includes field trips and in-person professional development experiences.
In March of 2020, as we reacted with the rest of the world to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we indefinitely paused our In-Person Class Trip and Visitor project type for the health and safety of teachers and students. Later that year, we formally launched Virtual Trip and Visitor Projects, allowing teachers to request funding for events held virtually, for both professional development and direct student engagement.
While we are thrilled to continue offering virtual projects of this kind, we are maintaining our indefinite pause of in-person trip, visitor, and event projects. Even before COVID-19, supporting these meaningful in-person projects was operationally difficult for DonorsChoose, and often complicated for teachers: documentation could be hard to obtain, reimbursements were often delayed, and changes in plans were hard to manage. Overall, we found that DonorsChoose staff could offer very limited support if (and when!) things went wrong. We are continuing this pause with the aim to ultimately make fulfilling these types of in-person projects more straightforward for our team and teachers alike.
We know how impactful in-person trip, visitors, and professional development events are for the growth of both teachers and students. Field trips, conferences, hands-on learning— these are all key experiences for classrooms, and we can assure you we are actively thinking about and listening to your feedback on the best ways to return these opportunities to our site.
In the meantime, please feel free to submit virtual and standard projects to help get your students what they need; these virtual trips have become a cornerstone of our site, with almost $2 million in funding toward over 1800 projects since October 2020. You can get started in creating one yourself by checking out our guide to virtual field trips and viewing these current projects for inspiration.
Note: While many virtual experiences (both professional development and student learning) are eligible as long as they meet project eligibility requirements, we are unable to post projects for virtual experiences and resources from Get Your Teach On.