Fundraiser set for students' Florida science trip

A Havre Middle School science teacher is taking 47 students on a science trip to Florida in June, where, among the activities scheduled, they are to disect a shark and snorkel with manatees.

“It’s a life-changing experience,” Danielle Parsons said.

Parsons, in her third year as a Havre science teacher, said she plans to make these trips routine, every year.

To help pay for the trip, she has set up a GoFundMe account and is holding a Pizza Hut fundraiser.

If customers say Thursday they are donating to the fundraiser, Pizza Hut will donate 20 percent of their purchase price to the Havre Middle School Science trip.

The GoFundMe account has a goal of $20,000, and Parsons said the reason for that amount is because she wants to help pay for costly $2,400-a-student trips in the coming years.

The all-inclusive trip, for which Parsons partnered with World Strides — an accredited company that organizes student travel packages for schools — includes air and busing expenses, hotels, meals, chaperones and instructors, among other things.

“This trip is going to be hands-on science,” Parsons said. “I think it’s just a great opportunity for students in our area to see a different environment and get a picture of how the world is.”

The students will be gone June 5-9. During the trip, Parsons wrote on the GoFundme page, “my students will get to: swim with an endangered species, participate in a bio-diversity study, learn to snorkel and observe Florida’s marine life, dissect a shark, kayak through mangrove forests, hand feed stingrays and visit a manatee hospital.”

Parsons said she moved to Havre from eastern Oregon after her husband accepted a job as an educator at Montana State University-Northern.

She said she pitched the idea for the trip after realizing that the middle school science department didn’t do trips like this one.

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Online: Middle school science trip GoFundMe page: gofundme.com/middle-school-science-trip