Ivanhoe’s Capital Venture

Attention, President Bush. If you misplaced a pretzel on or about May 22 in your residence, rest assured that it is in the custody of Colin Hansen, a fifth-grader from Ivanhoe Elementary School in Los Angeles, who found the aforementioned pretzel while touring the White House.

Colin may be willing to return it in exchange for cool stuff.

Then again, Colin and the 60 classmates who were here with him may prefer to engage you in a policy debate or a chat about history. Consider what Colin’s classmate Hayden Wheatley learned from his visit to George Washington’s burial place just a few hours after the pretzel incident.

“At Mount Vernon,” Hayden wrote in his journal, “I saw something that was cruel and very, very unusual. I saw where slaves ate, slept and lived. It was very small and very cramped. They slept in small houses with eight or 10 people living in each small house.... This is important to history because if the slaves were treated better there might not have been an awful chapter in history.”

I joined these fifth-graders here for four days late last month. I already knew many of them. My wife, Mary Frances Smith-Reynolds, was one of three teachers on the trip, along with Rodney Lee and Sylvia Stralberg. Principal Mary Jane Collier and 22 parents were also along.

Our mission was simple: Each morning, we descended from our fourth-floor Embassy Suites stronghold (one adult and three children per room) to board a pair of buses and to see, smell, hear and touch the immense enterprise that lies behind their morning Pledge of Allegiance.

How much democracy can a fifth-grader digest? Answers varied by the kid, by the hour and by the distractions at hand.

One moment they were cooing over pandas at the National Zoo (Makaela Nicola, Day 1) or purchasing fake dog poop (Colin Hansen, Day 2), and the next, they were beginning to grasp just about everything.

“It’s like we’re driving around in our social studies book,” Alex Ramirez said one night after the bus made a tour of the illuminated monuments.

“Yeah,” Arjay Orbita said, “except for all the cars.”

Until Liza Parisky visited Ford’s Theatre and heard the tale of Abraham Lincoln’s last hours, “I always thought that [John Wilkes Booth] just walked in and shot the guy,” she wrote. “I didn’t know there was so much planning and detail. I liked the fact that they left the room exactly like it was when he was shot. It’s bad that a great man had to lose his life, but I’m glad the guy who shot him had to suffer too. Lincoln died at 7:22 a.m. on April 15, 1865.”

Of the National Air and Space Museum, Torii MacAdams wrote: “I learned about World War I. I learned that the war was started because of each country’s economic interests.... The First World War made the U.S. realize the powers of other countries and how much power we had.”

And I learned that nothing dilutes cynicism--or saps energy--quite like seeing the world over the shoulders of an 11-year-old.

Ivanhoe, part of the Los Angeles Unified School District, sits in Silver Lake, five miles or so from downtown L.A. About one in six students is classified as an English learner (in other words, they haven’t completed the transition from their native language to English proficiency), and about one in five participates in the district’s free lunch program. The school had never before attempted a Washington trip.

Earlier this year, the fifth-grade classes held an evening program on immigration. A good number of these students, I knew, were born abroad, and many more were the first generation of their family born in the U.S. One by one, they took the dais before an auditorium full of parents and squirming siblings, and in halting words told of their roots.

Magica Roberts was born in the Philippines. Alejandro Quintana-Rebagliati’s dad came from El Salvador, his mom from Peru. Hana Ohira’s parents came from Japan. Lucia Minaya’s father came from the Dominican Republic, her mother from Guatemala. Kylie Thompson’s dad came from Australia, Ava Hess’ mom from Iran. Nastassia Godoy’s parents are Cuban. Chelsea and Jennifer Koga’s grandparents were in Japan during World War II. Winston Smith’s father is from Belize, his mother from El Salvador. The moms of Monica Reyes, Cecilia Perez and Treycy Alcala all came from Mexico.

In California, fifth grade is the year when you learn how the federal government is supposed to work and how it got this way. When you bring such recent and far-flung histories together to tackle that subject, a venture to Washington looks like it might be more than an oversized field trip. It might be glue to hold our mosaic together. It might even be one way that patriots are made.

The Ivanhoe parents, led by fifth-grade mothers Mary Lou Dudas and Marianne Jenny, started fund-raising for this trip last fall: rummage sale, Korean barbecue, car wash, talent show, silent auction and a concert at a local club. By May the campaign had taken in about $33,000, enough to pay for air fare, hotel bills, land transport and meals for every fifth-grader. As part of the campaign, families that could afford it contributed $850 per child: $300 for round-trip air fare, plus $550 for four hotel nights, bus transportation, most meals and entertainment. The parents paid their own way. Nine children and their families chose not to join the trip.

Once we arrived, the enterprise seemed even braver or more foolish. Class trips to Washington have become such a national ritual that in spring the city’s top landmarks seem awash in the matching T-shirts, ID tags and custom caps that chaperons use to identify their charges. Museums, monuments and many businesses tailor their offerings accordingly. But those trips typically involve eighth-and 11th-graders; the younger students more often come from the East, not the West.

So here we were, setting a campus precedent and amassing souvenir T-shirts, pencils, books, videos and commemorative coins. Then there was the written paper trail. Since this was a school trip, the kids, all 10 or 11 years old, were required to fill notebooks and journals with their observations. Because I have an in with Ms. Smith-Reynolds (and because the parents signed permission slips saying it was OK), I read their journals at night while they played Marco Polo in the pool.

Blanca Martinez on her first plane trip: “The clouds were cool. We ate breakfast and the omelet tasted like face cream and the pancakes tasted like rubber.”

Kylie Thompson, after more Smithsonian-scavenging: “The museums were all neat, but I am so darn TIRED. And my feet hurt! A LOT! Enough complaining, though. We saw some of the first ladies’ gowns, Lincoln’s top hat, an old doll house, famous athletes’ jerseys and skates.”

Makaela Nicola on the flag that inspired Francis Scott Key: “The real flag is 30 x 42. It shrunk and got a lot smaller. Now they have it in a room of preservatives so the flag does not get any smaller.”

Alyssa Macias on the National Museum of American History: “We also got to see how money was made. First they put a kind of liquid form in a thing that is shaped like a circle. Then they get a hard thing that feels like a rock but has one of the presidents’ faces on it. They push it in the liquid, and it forms a coin.”

Kevin Lessley on Day 2: “Today we woke up, ate breakfast, went to the Smithsonian, came back, and then we went swimming.”

Tommy Raiguel on Day 3: “We went to the White House. There was a tornado warning. I saw a gun. Today was really fun.”

Liza Parisky, after seeing the Hope Diamond, Dorothy’s ruby slippers from “The Wizard of Oz,” Dizzy Gillespie’s trumpet and bones of an Edmontosaurus and an Albertosaurus , all in her first 72 hours: “Fewer than 5% of the Smithsonian’s 140 million objects are currently on exhibit. I think that’s amazing! Did you know that four presidents were assassinated: Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy.”

On the first full day of the Ivanhoe trip, at the National Zoo, everybody fawned over the new pandas. In the U.S. Postal Museum, the kids used computers to create and send postcards home. In the gift shop, Ellie Gordon bought a Rosie the Riveter pin, enchanted by the “We can do it” credo. In the Newseum, an interactive museum in Arlington, Va., devoted to the history of journalism, the kids took turns searching out front pages from their date of birth and anchoring mini-newscasts for the cameras in the museum’s mock studio. In the evening, the class took in a dinner theater singing-and-dancing revue of oldies tunes.

That, it turned out, was the slow day.

On the second day, the Hope Diamond, housed in the National Museum of Natural History, drew rave reviews, although the land sloth bones also claimed a share of Sam Eaton’s enthusiasm.

At the National Museum of American History, an exhibit on the presidency included a lectern and TelePrompTer so visitors could reenact famous speeches from history. Cameron Gould-Saltman took on a JFK passage, Michael Ishimaru assayed Thomas Jefferson, and Nico Pierson did his best Ronald Reagan.

At the Air and Space Museum, Hayden Wheatley felt a moon rock, and almost everybody gawked at Apollo paraphernalia.

“Today we went to the space museum,” Winston Smith wrote in his journal. “I think we saw the Apollo 13. We saw more things. Then we ate hamburgers.”

In the evening, the group visited the Vietnam and Lincoln memorials, and it was here we experienced the edgiest moments of the trip. As the students filed along the wall, making rubbings on tracing papers and searching out relatives’ names, one of the boys, Sam Eaton, was reported missing. Anxieties rose.

It turned out he was fine; he had quickly hooked up with another Ivanhoe adult after heavy traffic separated him from his primary chaperon.

On the third day, before half the kids began their White House tour, Principal Mary Jane Collier took the microphone in the tour bus to remind them of the respect the office should be accorded.

“Once a president is in office, Americans get behind that presidency,” she said.

Certain anti-Republican remarks had been heard on the bus. And the day before, Torii MacAdams had purchased a copy of “Bushisms,” a collection of the president’s malapropisms. But Torii and the other skeptics kept their leanings to themselves. Alejandro Quintana-Rebagliati, meanwhile, bought a presidential Christmas tree ornament, as did Matthew Evans’ dad, Mike.

“There are 28 fireplaces,” Allie Luzon wrote in her journal. “Barbara is George Bush’s mother’s name. And there’s a blue room, green room and red room. And Ryan, the Secret Service agent, likes the blue room best.”

Monique Ramirez, who transferred to Ivanhoe late in the school year, looked at the finery of the state dining room and listened as a Secret Service officer reported that the White House has 132 rooms.

“I only have two rooms,” she said. “One for my mom and one for myself.”

But that didn’t mean she was envious. “This is a nice house, but I don’t like all the gold because it scares me,” she said. “It’s like a haunted house.”

At Mount Vernon, Monica Reyes placed daisies on George Washington’s tomb, and Liza Parisky learned that Washington’s dentures were made of elephant tusks and hippo teeth.

Blanca Martinez scribbled in her notebook that George Washington assembled a library of more than 800 books and “nearly wrote 40,000 letters.”

On a Potomac cruise that took them from Mount Vernon back to the capital, the kids ate sandwiches, gazed from the top deck at the fancy houses along the river, and staged spitting contests until teacher Rodney Lee suspended competition.

At Ford’s Theatre, a young park ranger on a bare stage gave a spellbinding 15-minute account of Lincoln’s assassination. From there the kids trooped back outside to see a) the room across the street where Lincoln died; and b) a tree almost completely encrusted with already-been-chewed gum, a sort of folk monument.

By the time they reached the Capitol on the afternoon of that third day, some of the kids and most of the adults had the look of marathoners at the 20th mile. While our earnest young guide described the 180-foot-high rotunda dome and the sandstone floors dating to 1824, Chelsea Koga and Stephanie Hagberg leaned back against the cool stone walls, gazing abstractly at the dome. Meanwhile, Chelsea’s twin, Jennifer, stood up front next to Torii MacAdams and Zachary Courtney, scribbling ferociously.

In the Capitol’s crypt area (built for George Washington but not occupied by him), Ceci Perez discovered that it’s possible to jump rope with those red velvet cords used to direct foot traffic, then was banned from exploiting her breakthrough. While the group stood by the rope, deciding where to go next, half a dozen men in serious suits strode past. At the head of the group: a grim-looking Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), headed toward the Senate floor. (The next morning, news leaked that the Republicans were losing their majority in the Senate because of James M. Jeffords’ decision to become an Independent.)

On the last night in town, as the group headed out of a shopping center food court and back to the buses, the sky suddenly came alive with crackling and booming, and a thunderstorm soaked everyone, probably the most dire thing that happened in a miraculous four days when nobody got sick, mugged or lost for more than 15 minutes. On their final morning in Washington, before the uneventful flight home, the Ivanhoe fifth-graders stepped out from their rooms and found that their entrance to the elevator was blocked by Ms. Stralberg, Ms. Smith-Reynolds and me. To get downstairs to breakfast (and to get a genuine pencil from Mount Vernon), they were told, you have to tell us one fact you learned on this trip.

Prairie dogs travel in groups, Isais Castellon said. (Certainly fifth-graders do.)

The Capitol dome weighs 900 million pounds, Arjay Orbita said. (A slight overstatement, perhaps; the cast iron in the dome weighs about 9 million pounds, according to the official Web site.)

There are only two pandas in the world, at the National Zoo, and the others are extinct, said John Villapondo. (This may be a surprise to those working to prevent their extinction at panda-breeding facilities.)

George Washington liked to dance, shy Priscilla Casillas whispered.

George Washington, Sam Eaton said, had 300 slaves.

George Washington had 145 slaves, said Ava Hess, but when he died he freed all of them. (Numbers do vary; history tells us his wife had a role in this too.)

Maybe the kids weren’t all precisely accurate. But who said democracy was perfect?