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At a Tuesday evening question-and-answer session on the Common Ground school’s ill-fated Yosemite trip of last week, parents, teachers and students of the program soundly rejected blame and finger-pointing as responses to the alleged misbehavior that cut short a planned two-day series of classes out in nature. 

Instead, while admitting responsibility for overstepping “common sense,” by taking too large a group and making other misjudgments, the school’s leaders sought to emphasize the lessons learned and set the record straight on the misadventure’s root causes. 

“My biggest disappointment is in the press,” said Dana Richards, the teacher who co-leads the small “school” within Berkeley High School, criticizing what he termed a “culture of negativism and hype.” 

“The whole thing kind of fell apart from the get-go with Curry Village’s incompetence,” said Tammy Harkins, the school’s other co-leader, referring to the large tent city where the students stayed. 

The Common Ground leaders cut their planned two-day trip short on Oct. 1, after concluding that the group was too large to manage in a setting that did not lend itself to keeping proper track of students. Between 9 and 10 p.m. that night, Curry Village staff received numerous complaints from other guests, which a spokesperson for the park’s concession company said included vandalism, rock-throwing, shoplifting, noisiness and rowdiness. 

“I apologize to you as parents who care so much about the security and safety of your students,” Richards said Tuesday. “I can also honestly say that nothing happened at Yosemite that doesn’t happen every day at Berkeley High.” 

A spokesperson for Yosemite Concession Services, which runs Curry Village, said last week that “about 30” of the  

students had behaved inappropriately, out of a group of 330. 

Richards and Harkins distributed a letter explaining the events at last Thursday’s Back-to-School night, and said an unexpected change in the check-in time from last year’s smaller, smoother Common Ground trip had forced the sudden rearrangement of the students’ afternoon itineraries that Sunday. This and several other inconveniences caused by the Curry Village organization, they wrote, led to an after-dark check-in at tents scattered throughout the village, after which the complaints came in. 

Among the lessons Richards and others cited for future trips were to keep the student-teacher ratio at a maximum of 8-to-1, to work harder on identifying students’ interests to better place them in their activities, to include parents more fully in the planning, and to choose a more appropriate destination. 

Harkins also added that it had been a mistake to wait until 12:30 p.m. on the Monday to contact the high school administrators about the decision, made more than 12 hours earlier, to bring the students home a day early. Above all, the trip leaders said, they would not attempt to take such a large group on an overnight trip again. 

A discussion on marijuana use took up a long period of the meeting. Harkins said it had been “widespread,” and that trip leaders had considered turning the buses around on the way up after faculty on one bus saw smoke being blown from the back of another. Maliyah Coye, a junior who had been on the trip, suggested a double standard was at play. 

“I don’t know why it’s such a big deal, people smoking weed in Common Ground,” because “people smoke weed all the time” on the Berkeley High grounds, she said. 

A parent then rose and expressed concern that his ninth-grade daughter be given a clear signal that drug use was not tolerated. 

“I have not heard a defined drug policy,” the parent said. “Forget about Berkeley High, what about Common Ground?” 

The trip leaders said that drug use was not tolerated and that they were waiting for the facts to emerge more fully before considering any disciplinary action. 

“There will be consequences,” said Harkins. 

Principal Frank Lynch, who attended the meeting, said any response to misbehavior was “going to come up from Common Ground and their discussions.” 

“Since they were up there and we weren’t, they’re going to tell us what needs to be done,” Lynch said. 

Board of Education Vice President Shirley Issel, who also attended Tuesday’s meeting, said the board and the administration needed to help the small schools with policies on discipline, field trips and the like. 

“Some teachers feel they can’t turn to the administration because they feel it is either too overwhelmed or doesn’t have the capacity to meet their needs, so they try to do it themselves,” Issel said. “But as we can see, it really can’t work.” 

Two parents suggested the trip might have been scheduled for the end of the year rather than the beginning, in order to exclude those who had not “earned” participation with their behavior. But Coye disagreed.  

“As a community, as Common Ground, as parents we need to get together to help those students,” she said. Later in the meeting, the audience applauded when she added: “I think it’s good that this came out early in year. These people are students, and their problems are everyone’s problems.” 

Lynch also praised the small school for its attempt to bring everyone to Yosemite. “Their whole intent, because Common Ground is a small learning community, was to be able to give the opportunity to all students instead of singling out who could go and who could not go,” he said. “So their heart was in the right place.” 

Several students and parents also said the students had a good experience at Yosemite on the abbreviated second day. 

“We basically did everything we set out to do,” said Wendy Ellen, a world dance teacher. 

“I enjoyed myself highly,” said Michael Cochran, Ellen’s son, a student on the trip.  

Another teacher, Ellen Bracken, said “a lot of growth” came out of Tuesday’s forum. “Instead of some teachers saying, let’s get this person and kick them out, they were looking for some more long-term solutions.” 

At the end of the meeting, a parent congratulated Richards, saying, “Thanks for not making our kids into snitches.”