When Jamie Bates boarded Delta Flight 86 bound for London, she was excited and a little nervous. She'd just graduated and was about to set off on the trip of a lifetime: 28 days in Europe with 80 current and former Dobson High School students. Her family paid more than $5,000 for the trip, led by Angie DiMaggio, a longtime Dobson teacher who had led such tours many times.
Laura Segall
Jamie Bates quickly realized her trip to Europe was a big mistake.
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As she settled in for the long flight, Bates tried to relax. She already missed her boyfriend, but she was looking forward to the chance to have fun before starting college.
In less than an hour, she realized she'd made a huge mistake.
By the time she arrived home on June 25, Bates wished she'd never gone. She'd been treated for a nasty blood infection, berated by her leader, and she'd stayed in a string of hotels that were anything but the three- and four-star lodgings she thought her parents had paid for.
But Jamie Bates, a waif-like, saucer-eyed 18-year-old who works at her dad's fence-building company and attends community college (she plans to major in psychology), was lucky. As she shuffled off the plane at Sky Harbor, she was wounded physically and emotionally — but at least she was still standing. Her classmate Evan Bailey wasn't so lucky. He lay fighting for his life in an Italian hospital after taking a golf club to the head during a bar brawl in Florence that left him comatose and possibly brain-damaged.
Bates and Bailey got the worst of it, but bad things happened on the trip, from beginning to end.
Instead of tales about the Louvre and Michelangelo's David, the kids came home with stories about a hotel in Paris where students didn't feel safe leaving their rooms, and another in Venice where a used condom and blood were found in the supposedly fresh sheets.
According to several kids, meals often were inedible. The air conditioner on one of the tour buses broke down on one of the hottest days of the year in Rome. Binge drinking was constant.
A chaperone was told to leave the trip for allegedly offering psychedelic mushrooms to students, while another was kicked off, and possibly deported from Italy, under more mysterious circumstances.
At one point, the trip sponsor, Passports Inc., a Massachusetts-based courier that runs hundreds of international trips each year, contemplated sending the whole group home early.
It was only when two of DiMaggio's chaperones stepped up to lead the trip, replacing her, that the company changed its mind.
The scene, as Bates and her classmates passed through the gate and into their parents' arms, was grim. And angry.
Most of the kids weren't happy. They were just relieved to be home.
Nadea Tanzadeh, another student on the trip, agrees with Bates that it wasn't what she expected.
"Our trip turned to hell," she says. "It wasn't our fun Europe trip. It was our 'When can we go home?' trip."
Every summer, thousands of students across the U.S. take trips around the world. Most of them don't make the headlines. Aside from the case of Natalie Holloway, who remains missing after a 2005 senior trip to Aruba, an in-depth search of news archives revealed only one death: a student who drowned in a lake in Fort Worth, Texas. Teachers lead groups everywhere from Disneyland to Europe, from Mexico to Japan. Student travel is often sold to parents as a cultural experience — a way for students to enrich their course of study and to receive academic credit.
But the reality is, these trips are often run outside of school district boundaries and rules. Teachers organize them, but they are doing so as individuals, not school employees, and, in Angie DiMaggio's case, clearly without enough adult supervision.
After 14 years, DiMaggio's trips had a reputation. Though parents might not have been aware, it was well known among Dobson High kids that this was the kind of vacation on which underage students could drink freely. In fact, before the trip, DiMaggio even had parents sign a waiver so that their kids could drink in Europe (where the drinking age is 16 in some countries and 18 in others) — though parents say she told them it was to allow for a glass of wine at dinner, not a night out at the club. She says that if parents didn't sign the waiver, the student would not be allowed to drink.
"It's 21 here, but it's 18 and 16 there, and they don't check, so we have to have an understanding," DiMaggio says. "I told parents everything in regards to this. We are not going to stay in hotel rooms at night. We're going to go out. That's the fun of this. You can't pound kids with facts and history and museums for 15 hours a day."
(For weeks, DiMaggio denied requests for an interview for this story. Several days before publication, she agreed to sit down for more than an hour, with her lawyer present.)
By all accounts, DiMaggio was lucky. She was permissive but never ran trips that went awry.
The summer of 2007 was different. The group was one of her largest ever. She went with a tour company she'd never used before. There were only three chaperones in addition to her, a ratio of one chaperone to about 20 kids.
