School's Downtown Location Makes for a Unique Field Trip

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — Drivers and oncoming pedestrians were likely a little confused when they encountered ninety students walking down Figueroa on Monday morning. The 9th graders are students at Oscar de la Hoya Animo Charter High School, currently located in the World Trade Center at 3rd and Figueroa. This morning they used their convenient Downtown location to take a walking field trip to the Grammy Museum at L.A. Live.

I'm a little biased when it comes to thinking this trip was a cool idea. The students' teacher and the trip leader was my wife Kathy. Ed Fuentes and I both helped chaperone.

Much of the expense of a trip like this one comes from renting buses to transport the kids. Since the school is just a little over six blocks from the new museum, the walk was a way to cut costs and expose the kids to a little more of Downtown.

At the museum, the students participated in a workshop connected to the "Songs of Conscience, Sounds of Freedom" exhibit. USC professor Josh Kun helped the kids explore how popular music continues to play a role in politics and social issues. He tied today's music back to the songs of Woodie Guthrie and Cesar Chavez' efforts for farm worker rights.

Though Kun didn't know it ahead of time, that tied in perfectly with what the students were studying. They just began a unit on the Chicano civil rights movement last week.