In a small corner of Lafayette Parish, there’s a school where giraffes and science labs, bayous and basketball arenas are not distant concepts in textbooks. They are real places that children reach not with privilege, but with planning.
At Martial Billeaud Elementary, led by Principal Christy Hayes, the faculty didn’t just talk about equity. They wrote it into the budget.
They reimagined their 2024–2025 Title I funding and mobilized a school-wide chocolate fundraiser. Not to build a playground. Not to pay for supplies. But to secure a different kind of access: field trips. Not one. Not a few. For every grade, every student.
Some of those trips were funded entirely, at no cost to families. Others carried a small fee—drastically reduced by the school’s contributions. And when a student couldn’t pay, that cost quietly disappeared. No child was excluded. No experience withheld. The promise of opportunity remained intact, even if the method shifted behind the scenes.
If you grew up with field trips as a childhood rite of passage, you may not realize how many public school students now live without them. Budgets are tight. Transportation is costly. Priorities are triaged. Enrichment is often what gets edged out.
But at Martial Billeaud, the administration asked a bold question: what if wonder wasn’t optional?
So students visited the Audubon Aquarium and Insectarium, their fingers pressed to glass as they watched creatures from oceans they may never see in person. Others walked the grounds of UL Lafayette’s athletic facilities, mapping dreams onto turf and track. Some floated through the mystery of McGee’s Swamp, learned environmental science in the wilds of Moncus Park, or held lemurs at Barnhill Preserve. They explored physics at Sci-Port in Shreveport and shared popcorn in a theater—simple joys, layered with meaning.
This is what opportunity looks like. Not as a buzzword, but as a verb. A team of educators bending the system, not breaking it, to give their students what they deserve.
It would be easy to dismiss these field trips as “extras,” something sweet on top of the serious business of instruction. But that’s a failure of imagination. Learning doesn’t just happen in front of a whiteboard. It happens in the moment a child sees a jellyfish glow or feels the velvet fur of a kangaroo. In the moment they realize the world is bigger than their neighborhood—and that they belong in it.
These moments stick. They change a child’s perception of the world and of themselves in it.
And what Martial Billeaud has proven, quietly and powerfully, is that opportunity is not about luck. It is about leadership.
That’s why LPSS names opportunity one of its core values. Not because it sounds good in a tagline, but because it demands action. It demands that we ask more of ourselves and more for our students.
At Billeaud, that demand has been met. And in doing so, they’ve delivered something better than a day at the zoo or a bus ride to Baton Rouge.
They’ve delivered belonging. And for a child in a public school, that may be the most powerful place a field trip can lead.