In an exclusive interview, The Paw Print’s Gia Arnold sat down with Spanish teacher Mr. Phil Deaton to discuss next summer’s European trip.

Gia: Recently on the announcements I heard that you and Mrs. Vouk would be chaperoning the trip to Spain and France. Why did you decide to be a part of this trip and how did you get involved?

Deaton: Oh man, how did I get involved? Well, I’ll start about 10 years ago when I was inspired to become a teacher. Nah, I’m just kidding. Alright, so I took my first trip in 2017 to Costa Rica and after that, I wanted to take kids somewhere else. At the time, I was more familiar with Costa Rica, so I took them there first. On my next trip, I tried to go to Peru and I just couldn’t get enough interest. I thought that Europe would bring a lot more interest, and I wanted to work with Mrs.Volk on going to France and kind of do a combined trip. For already spending the money to go to Europe, why not give the kids the most amount of things to see for their money and whatnot. That’s how we came up with Spain and France together, a combined trip. We tried to do that for last year, but of course, everything happened, so we had to reschedule for this year. So that’s how this kind of all progressed. We tried to find a trip that is farther away and that is going to involve more students and be interactive, while also trying to give them the most amount of things to see for their money.

Gia: Since there is a pandemic, things like traveling look a lot different than they previously had. My family canceled a lot of our trips for safety reasons. What concerns you about the trip and will anything be altered due to Covid?

Deaton: Well, every country has different regulations. We don’t know what the future is going to hold in terms of flight regulations and if people have to be vaccinated in order to fly or enter a country. I mean every country is different, so we have to make sure that we adhere to those laws. So if Spain and France for example, next year decide that they want to make vaccination a mandatory law, and you are choosing not to be vaccinated, that may influence your decision. So those are things that could possibly influence if students come or not. Our hope is that mask mandates are gone so that while we’re there, we don’t have to worry about all that, but you never know.

Gia: Yes. I’m hoping that the mask mandates end soon. Did any of these regulations make this trip harder to plan compared to other trips?

Deaton: It didn’t make it harder to plan necessarily, it pushed it back and caused some issues in the fact that we had everything going and then we had to cancel. Now we are doing another year and now we had to get more people involved, but I feel like we have had more students this year actually interested than we actually did last year. So in that case, it has kind of helped our number issue that we were having before. Whether that’s because people did cancel and so now I don’t wanna say they have extra money, but they didn’t use that money for their vacation so they’re looking to use that money for their student to go on a trip. Or maybe the stimulus checks that came out, maybe that’s helping some people, and making the trip a little more attainable because they can use some of the money for this trip. I’m not sure how much of that plays into this, as well as to why we have so many more people than we did last year, but we do have a substantially greater amount than last year.

Gia: It’s great to hear that so many students are interested in this trip! What are some of the activities that you are looking forward to on this trip?

Deaton: Oh goodness, the whole trip. I don’t even think I could pick one activity. Okay, I could, the Camp Nou Stadium Tour in Barcelona. As a soccer coach and fan, that’s gonna be so cool to see and be there and be inside the stadium and the locker room. I’m really pumped about that, but I’m excited to see it all and I’m just as excited about going to Madrid as Barcelona and Paris, I couldn’t pick just one thing

Gia: Okay last question, when will this trip take place and how long is the trip?

Deaton: It’s a 13-day trip, so it’ll be June 8th through the 21st.

Gia: Thank you for taking the time to be interviewed!

Deaton: No problem, Gia!