West Philadelphia students travel to Bahamas, across the globe for worldly life lessons

PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) -- The approach to education at Global Leadership Academy Charter Schools doesn't just take learning out of the classroom. It takes it out of the country.

"We've been to China. We've been to Kenya East Africa," said the school's founder and CEO, Dr. Naomi Johnson Booker.

It's how the school truly lives up to its name.

"Our base is to prepare future leaders of the world. And we do that by sharing the world with them," said Booker, who founded the school 17 years ago in West Philadelphia.

When Booker founded the K-8 charter school, she knew the kids enrolled would have to leave the city to learn about the world.

"My kids live in a ten-block radius for the most part," she said. "Some of them don't even get to the zoo!"

That makes it all the more remarkable, that eighth graders' studies of the Transatlantic Slave Trade took them a thousand miles away to the Bahamas.

"(The Bahamas) have the highest group of artifacts that will explain the slave trade," Booker said.

The students left on Monday, May 22, and returned on Friday, May 26. For years, the students looked forward to the eighth-grade trip.

"I feel like that is an opportunity not to be taken for granted," said eighth grader Ziyun Reese.

More than 50 students went on the trip to the Bahamas. There, they learned that enslaved people in the Bahamas lived very different lives than Africans enslaved in America.

"They were able to buy land, they were able to sell their food. They were able to grow their own food," said Krystian Massiah-Clark, another eighth grader.

Those are the types of things students learned that aren't in textbooks.

"We came there to study where we really came from and what our ancestors really went through to get where we are now," said Reese.

"To really experience something, you have to go through it or see how others went through it," said eighth grader Caiden Brown.

Among the artifacts, are statues that show the perseverance of African culture among enslaved people who were brought to the Bahamas.

"They built these statues where the women are pointing towards Africa. These are things that they will never forget," said Booker.

Fundraising helped students who wouldn't have been able to afford the trip.

"We went to Atlanta, Mississippi, and Tennessee," said Global Leadership Academy sixth grader Madison Brown.

The sixth-grade trip to Alabama was for a first-hand lesson on the civil rights movement.

"When you're there, you really can feel it," said Brown.

"We went across the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma," said Booker. "I could feel myself walking with Dr. King."

It's an experience Booker actually did have at 17 years old.

"I went to school in Atlanta. I walked with Dr. King and John Lewis," she said.

She hopes to give her students the same type of life-changing experience by helping them to learn across the globe.

"When you open up a child's world, they reach for it," she said.