Head Girls Basketball Coach & Girls Coordinator, Lin Ellis, has been in charge of planning out the Europe trip. At the moment, the date of the trip isn’t set in stone, but the trip is estimated to be about 9 to 11 days long.

“We’re looking at late June. Well, let me just say it’s late June. The actual dates have not been set yet, but we’re looking at doing it that way. It will be before the July 4th weekend, but it will be after school lets out,” Ellis said.

There is a difference in the cost of the trip for students and adults.

“Right now roughly it’s around $3,800 for a student, and if we have an adult over the age of 20 or older it runs around $4,300,” Ellis said.

Several places will be visited during the trip.

“Okay so we’re actually going to go to Rome first and we’ll go to all of the big stuff you know. We’ll get to go to the Sistine Chapel. We’ll go to the Vatican. We’ll go see the Hippodrome, or what’s left of it. We’ll get to walk around all of the different plazas, the Spanish Steps, and what we’ll do is we’ll go to Athens and Greece and we will spend a couple of days there. We’ll go to the Parthenon and all of the places up there, and there’s also an option if there are people who want to go to the beach because it’s volcanic sand, so it’s a different color from what we have over here,” Ellis said.

People attending the trip might get the option to stay an extra day in Europe.

“They’ve given us the option that if we tell them in enough time that they can actually take our plane trip home, so the people that can’t stay an extra day, they can go ahead and fly home. The rest of us that want to stay an extra day can. They’ll help us set up our hotels and everything and they’ll add it to the cost and we’ll find out what that is later for an extra day, and then we can spend the day at the beach or whatever and then come back and spend the night at the hotel and then fly back the following day,” Ellis said

To help pay for the trip, many fundraisers will be held.

“We’re definitely going to be having some fundraisers. I’ve got one of the mothers who has emailed me with some ideas for some fundraisers and I’m actually going to take a shot at it. I’m thinking about building one of those river tables. They’re made out of wood but they have epoxy that goes out of the middle. So I’m thinking of building something like that. The cost of them usually online runs about $6,000 and so what I’m going to do is build one and donate it to the cause and we’ll have a raffle for it. Also, my wife who works at education first is going to see if she can use some of her bank contacts there to see if we can get some sponsors as well. Not sure what exactly we’re going to get but we’re going to do a lot,” Ellis said.

Fundraising for the trip will begin after one of the main steps to set up the trip is dealt with.

“As soon as we get the list of kids going that are finalized,” Ellis said.

COVID-19 has impacted this trip in a way, and one of the effects is that there’s more time for fundraising.

“Well I actually wanted to have it this coming summer, in the summer of 2021, but all of the trips that got canceled this past summer because of everything that went on. They’ve all been rescheduled to this summer and so what we’ve done is there was no more we could do. All of them were booked up there was no place to send us without making the cost even more expensive. So they said we could actually put it off for another summer which actually works out well because it gives us more time to raise money for everybody to raise money. But yeah it did affect it a little bit and now that some of the European countries have started to shut down, there are some of the places wondering if they’re even going to get all of the kids over there this summer that they originally had. But our trip once we get it set up will be guaranteed, so we won’t have to worry about us getting bumped or anything,” Ellis said.