ROCHESTER — Roger Larsen has remained a teacher long after he retired. He may have left the textbooks behind, but the lessons have continued.
For the past 10 years, his classroom has exclusively been the real world of the East Coast, where he has been introducing his students to the history and culture of the United States beyond their normal Midwestern perspective.
And this year, he’s teaching his last lesson, 30 years after he first began the annual eighth-grade trip for students of Rochester Public Schools to New York and Washington, D.C.
“It’s bittersweet; it really is,” he said over the phone on Wednesday while his group of students was walking through Central Park. “The cherry blossoms are beautiful.”
Larsen took his first group of students on the trip in 1996, when he was an earth science teacher at Kellogg Middle School. His daughter wanted to go on the trip her own school of John Adams was taking, and Larsen decided to organize one for Kellogg over the same time.
Former Rochester Public Schools teacher Roger Larsen is pictured at the U.S. Capitol during his last year of taking eighth grade students on a trip over spring break.
Contributed / Central Photo Company
Over the years, the trip merged into a district-wide eighth grade trip over spring break.
The only two years he missed were during the pandemic. The next time they took the trip after that, they opened it up to ninth and 10th graders as well, letting all the students come who missed it during their eighth-grade year.
They cover a lot of territory in just a few days. After landing at all three major airports around Washington, D.C., they work their way around the capital in five buses.
They take in as much of the region’s history and culture as they can, visiting places like Ford’s Theater, where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, the Capitol Building and the Smithsonian.
Some years, they’ve been able to see administrators and elected officials speak, like Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton.
In the first year he led the trip, they went with other schools from California and Arizona, and one of the teachers had a personal connection to the late John McCain.
“John McCain got us into a lot of places in the Capitol that we would not have gotten into, and haven’t gotten into since,” Larsen said.
From D.C., they take five buses up to New York City, where they make their way from place to place by foot, subway, and ship.
They visit Chinatown and Little Italy, the Statue of Liberty, and see a Broadway show. This year, they were going to see “The Outsiders.”
On Wednesday, they were part of the audience for the filming of The Today Show.
Larsen officially retired as a teacher in 2016, but he has kept organizing the annual trip ever since then. That means, that his time teaching students through the real-world experience has been longer than the 24 years he spent in the classroom.
Now, at 74, he’s stepping down so that others can take over. Next year, the trip will continue under the direction of a teacher from Willow Creek Middle School, Emily Lynch.
This year — along with his wife and 21 chaperones — he is leading a group of 205 students for the final time.
“Most people would tell you I move faster than the kids, and that’s still pretty true,” he said. “I started in ’96, and Bill Clinton was president. It’s really hard to give it up, but I think you need someone a little younger.”
Jordan Shearer covers K-12 education for the Post Bulletin. A Rochester native, he graduated from Bemidji State University in 2013 before heading out to write for a small newsroom in the boonies of western Nebraska. Bringing things full circle, he returned to Rochester in 2020 just shy of a decade after leaving. Readers can reach Jordan at 507-285-7710 or jshearer@postbulletin.com.