About Us

Our founder grew up in Northern Virginia going on field trips. Museums, nature centers, parks. His high school marching band took a trip to Hawaii, playing for veterans in the 76th Anniversary Pearl Harbor Memorial Parade, and his brother saw three Broadway shows in New York with the theater group. There were so many trips he struggles to remember them all, and they were part of what made his experience in school so special. But these experiences have never been available to every kid in Virginia. They only happened because his community had the resources to make them happen.

For a lot of students, a field trip is not a given. During and after the 2008 recession, more than half of American schools cut the trips they had planned.¹ When Johns Hopkins researchers pulled attendance records from 18 leading art museums, 15 of them showed fewer school visits between 2000 and 2018.² In the Johns Hopkins study, every museum named transportation as a major barrier. A field trip bus can cost $300 to $700 a day, and district-owned buses often carry a $500 to $600 minimum.³ A charter bus runs higher, around $950 to $2,000 a day. Title I, the main federal funding stream for low-income schools, generally cannot pay for a field trip unless it is tied to academic standards.⁴ And schools with the most low-income students are the ones least able to cover a trip.

The trips are worth fighting for. In the first large-scale randomized study of school museum visits, covering more than 10,000 students, a single one-hour tour raised critical thinking, historical empathy, and tolerance, and students from high-poverty schools gained two to three times more than their peers.¹ The same Johns Hopkins study that tracked the decline found something else: of the few museums whose school attendance rose, the ones that grew were the ones that removed cost barriers by covering buses, substitute teachers, and lunch, or making admission free for kids.² Taking away costs brings back trips.

That is what Muddy Boots Foundation does. We partner with high need schools in Virginia and Washington, D.C. and commit to them year after year. At each partner school, a whole grade goes on one Expedition a year, the same grade every year, and we pay the bus company and the venue directly, so the school never has to find the money or front it. All kids should have the chance to leave their classrooms, to see the world, and to learn from it.