Ninety area junior high school students will take a three-day trip to Chicago after winning a district-wide abstinence-based essay contest.
Cindy Sniderwin, In-Focus Program Coordinator for Rend Lake College, said every seventh-grade student in 14 junior high schools in the Rend Lake College district wrote an essay on abstinence. The 90 winners leave early on the morning of Wednesday, June 16, and will return late Friday, June 18.
During the trip, the winners will take a dinner cruise, visit a comedy club and take a city highlight tour which will take the group by Harpo Studios, Wrigley Field and Chicago’s statue of Michael Jordan.
The participants also will enjoy a variety of fine dining, with stops at The Cheesecake Factory, Olive Garden, Giordano’s Restaurant and Pizzeria, Rainforest Cafe and the Bubba Gump Shrimp Company.
The group will see an IMAX film and visit the Field Museum to see "Sue," the most complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex ever discovered.
The trip will be chaperoned and organizers met with parents of the winners to explain the trip.
"These are all cultural activities," Sniderwin said. "We’ll be going places lots of the students would not have the opportunity to see."
This is the seventh year the contest has been held, Sniderwin said. With new federal funding added to the current state funding of abstinence programs, organizers were able to double the number of trip-takers from 45 to 90, she added. The new federal funding allowed RLC to implement its abstinence program in four additional Perry County junior high schools.
"It has definitely been a team effort this year by our department," Sniderwin said.
For more information about In-Focus/Keep-Focused abstinence programs or about the Chicago trip, contact Sniderwin at (618) 437-5321, Ext. 1350, or call toll-free at 1-800-369-5321.