news : After 70 Years, Bank Street Educators will return to Arthurdale, site of the first Long Trip

Press Release
Contact: Enid Goldberg, Director of Communications, Bank Street College of Education
Phone: 212-961-3325/ Fax: 212-961-3345
Email: Egoldberg@BankStreet.edu
Or contact: Fern Khan, Bank Street Division of Continuing Education
Phone: 212-961-3401 / Email: Fkhan@BankStreet.edu

Return to West Virginia: After 70 years, Educators from the Bank Street College of Education will revisit the places of the first Bank Street "Long Trip"

Trip Date: April 9-16, 2006

Origin of the "Long Trip" - A Bank Street Tradition that focuses on exploring a region's environmental and socio-economic concerns, educational facilities, culture, and history. Believing that the teacher who learns is the teacher who can teach, Bank Street's founder, Lucy Sprague Mitchell, initiated the Long Trip tradition in 1935 by taking a group of her teaching students to Arthurdale, the New Deal community in WV, where miners out of work because of the Depression were being resettled and trained to be farmers. At Eleanor Roosevelt's request, Mrs. Mitchell had earlier helped to establish the town's school and community center. The group also talked with miners and their families, and visited coal mines and Scotts Run, the destitute mining town from which miners were relocated to Arthurdale.

The 2006 Long Trip will:

Visit Arthurdale and talk with people who attended the school in the 1930s;
Visit the Scotts Run Settlement house in Osage, to talk with people from the destitute mining town from which miners were relocated to Arthurdale;
Explore issues surrounding current-day coal mining and the environment: the group will fly in small planes over mountain-top removal sites, meet with historians and environmental activists, and visit an underground mine;
Experience West Virginia culture through performing artists, artists, and storytellers.

The mission of Bank Street College is to improve the education of children and their teachers by applying to the educational process all available knowledge about learning and growth, and by connecting teaching and learning meaningfully to the outside world. In so doing, we seek to strengthen not only individuals, but the community as well, including family, school, and the larger society in which adults and children, in all their diversity, interact and learn. We see in education the opportunity to build a better society.