Please take several minutes to read through the policies and expectations below and let us know if you have any questions. We have honed these through years of experience and are certain our students are happier and healthier as a result.
Pre-Trip Calls From Apogee Leaders: Trip leaders will call each of their students’ families before their trip start to introduce themselves and give you a chance to ask any final questions you have. Please look out for a call from a “blocked” or “restricted”* number in the week before our trips starting at the end of June. Families with students on trips starting later in the summer (mid-July, late July, or early August) can expect the pre-trip call a day or two ahead of the trip start.
* We ask our leaders to block their numbers because they will be calling from their personal cell phones and we do our best to keep those numbers private. Thank you for understanding!
Student Cell Phones, Cameras, and Technology in General: Please remember that students will not be permitted to carry cell phones, smart watches, Kindles, or similar electronic devices with screens on their trips. We love the fact that our trips provide a true break from the demands of keeping up with texting and other social media. These technologies are fantastic tools, but they can also detract enormously from the group dynamic we work hard to foster while on trip.
That said, we do expect that most students flying to their trips will be traveling with cell phones – and our leaders will be collecting all phones upon arrival. Your child should know this after signing our electronics policy, but a reminder from you that they will need to give up their phone on arrival will make things much easier for our leaders. Please do not send your child with anything more than their phone, a charger, and headphones. We have limited space to store student electronic devices while on trip, so please leave iPads, Kindles, etc. at home.
You are welcome to send your child with a disposable or point-and-shoot digital camera to take pictures (GoPro-type cameras are also welcome). Depending on the trip, there will likely be opportunities to recharge cameras – but please remind your child that cameras should never be left unattended while charging. Fitness tracking watches (such as a Garmin watch) are permitted, but watches with gaming capabilities or any wearable device that can connect to WiFi or a cellular network (such as an Apple Watch or certain models of the Fitbit) are not allowed on trip.
Hearing From and Contacting Your Child While on Trip: There will not be scheduled mid-trip calls home for trips shorter than two weeks.
Students on our trips that are longer than two weeks (Alps Explorer and Europe Coast to Coast) will make one or two scheduled calls home, depending on the length of their trip. You can find the date of these scheduled calls home on the Final Trip Information packet that we will email to you a few weeks prior to your child’s trip.
When students do call home, as with the pre-trip calls home, the call will likely come through as a “Restricted” or “Blocked” number.
Regardless of the length of their trip, students flying to their trip will always be in touch by phone or text to let you know that they have met up with their leaders on arrival.
We are in daily contact with our trips, and are able to put you in touch with your child if you need to speak. If you need to reach your child during their trip, please contact us at 207-725-7025 and we will reach out to the group in the field. Please do not contact the leaders directly, even if you happen to have their cell phone numbers.
Sending Emails to Your Child: Each of our trips will have a designated “email stop” day, where students will be shown emails sent by family members. We will provide detailed instructions on how to send these emails in your child’s Final Trip Information packet, and we kindly request you to limit your emails to a maximum of two emails per sender (e.g. two from parents, two from friends, etc.) as exceeding this number becomes challenging for our leaders to download. Note that students will enjoy reading your messages but will not be able to respond, so don’t expect an email back!
Daily Blog: We update our blog every day during the summer. Each day, there will be a new post with a short paragraph about what the group did during the day. Some days, we’ll also post a photo of the group along with the description of their activity. That said, there will be days, due to lack of good cell service or other logistical reasons, where there is not a photo posted on the blog for your child’s group. In that case, we promise that “no news is good news.”* Note that pictures on the blog are from leaders’ phones that they text to our office – so they are only as good as the phone cameras they are using. Most days, our blog post should be posted by 8:30 PM on the east coast.
* Our leaders carry satellite communication devices on those trips that regularly operate outside of cell service – they are able to be in touch 24 hours a day in the event of an emergency.
Please know that we take our students’ privacy seriously. Because our blog is open to the public, we are always vague about a trip’s whereabouts. When posting an update, we may say something like, “our Maine’s Downeast Explorer trip is off to a great start on the coast of Maine today,” but we will not say, “here’s a picture of our Maine’s Downeast Explorer group enjoying dinner at Bradbury Mountain State Park in Freeport, Maine, tonight.” Similarly, we typically do not refer to students by name at all in our summer blog – if we do refer to a student, it would be by first name only.
To access the blog updates on your child’s trip – click on each day’s blog entry (likely to have a clever title such as, “Day 23: Back to the Future”), then simply scroll down to your child’s trip. The important thing to know is that each day – not each trip – will have its own blog entry.
Social Media: We will post additional content from our summer trips on our Instagram (@apogee.adventures) account on a regular basis, too. Because of the limitations of our blog, we typically can’t post more than one or two photos per trip on any given day. Our Instagram posts will include more candid photos (rather than the strictly group photos featured on the blog), videos, and additional trip content. Please follow us there to keep up with our summer trips! Note that we use the same privacy rules for our Instagram that we do for our blog (not using specific place names or student names).
Food Allergies: Every year, students come to their Apogee trips with severe, and in some cases, life-threatening, food allergies. We do our best to work with families to accommodate these students (and the rest of their group) so that they can enjoy a great trip without fear of an allergic or anaphylactic reaction.
To that end, we will be running some of our trips as “nut free” (we’ll usually be more specific – such as “tree nut free” or “peanut free”). If your child is in one of these groups, we will email you ahead of time and ask that you do not send your child with any food that contains these ingredients. On behalf of the families affected by these allergies, thanks very much for your understanding!
Medications: If you are sending your child with any medications (over-the-counter or prescription), please make sure you have listed them on your child’s Health History form. If your child has recently started taking a new medication, you can reach out to us to re-open your Health History form in order to add the medication to your form.
Our trip leaders are required to collect and administer all medication, including over-the-counter medication, vitamins/supplements, and prescription creams/ointments. The sole exceptions to this requirement are rescue medications such as EpiPens or inhalers.
We send our trips out with the following over-the-counter medications: ibuprofen (Advil), acetaminophen (Tylenol), diphenhydramine (Benadryl), cetirizine (Zyrtec), calcium carbonate (Tums), and bismuth subsalicylate (Pepto Bismol). To that end, unless your child takes any of the above OTC medication daily (rather than as needed), please do not send your child with any of the above, as we will already have plenty on hand.
Incident Notification Policy: In the event of an accident or illness on trip, we will inform you about any administration of care requiring more than rudimentary first aid. The vast majority of incidents during the summer are exceedingly minor. Nonetheless, if our staff apply significant first aid or take your child to see a doctor for any purpose, we will notify you by phone as quickly as possible. This means we won’t be in touch every time we apply a band-aid to a blister or give ibuprofen for a headache, but we will err on the side of letting you know when we’ve treated your child. After we’ve notified you initially, we will stay in touch as the situation warrants. To make sure our calls reach you, please add our office number – (207) 725-7025 – to your contacts.
Left Behind Clothing and Gear: If your child returns home after their trip missing an item or two, please let us know and we will look for it on our end. We will not throw items away, but at the same time, we will not ordinarily reach out proactively if, for example, we find an unlabeled water bottle in the van after a trip ends.
Travel Delays and Cancellations: While we wish it weren’t the case, we know that some students will experience flight delays and/or cancellations while traveling to or from their Apogee trips. Rest assured, we track all arriving flights on trip start days and will work with you to make a plan to meet your child upon arrival at their destination airport if they are delayed. Because we do not organize student travel, however, we are unable to coordinate with airlines on your behalf.
Similarly, on departure day, we monitor for delays and cancellations. While rare, if a change to your child’s itinerary requires them to spend an extra night in the trip location, we can supervise them for up to 24 hours after the trip ends (an additional supervision fee will apply) while you make alternate arrangements.
Final Trip Information: We are in the process of emailing our Final Trip Information packets to those families with trips starting in June.* We will be emailing these to you directly rather than posting them to your family portal. These packets include a detailed itinerary, biographical information about our trip leaders, email stop information, and any relevant final packing and travel information (which will include specific drop-off and pick-up location information for trips starting in the northeast).
* Those families in our second, third, and fourth round of trips can expect to receive this information two to three weeks before their child’s trip starts.
We do not include students’ names in these packets so that students can arrive at Apogee with a “blank slate” – in other words, they will not have to worry that other participants have pre-judged them based on their social media profiles.
A friendly reminder, too, that there is a suite of informational documents posted to your family portal on CampMinder under “Forms & Documents.” This is where you’ll find your child’s packing list and a “What to Expect” document – both very useful documents as you prepare for your child’s upcoming Apogee trip!
Additionally, we wrote a number of informational blogs this spring for families who are preparing for their child’s upcoming Apogee trip. You can find them linked below on various topics:
Early Enrollment Announcement: Finally, we are delighted to let you know that we will be opening enrollment to alumni families for our 2027 season in early July. Alumni families will enjoy not only first dibs on 2027 trips and programs, but also a $300 trip discount if you enroll by the end of Sunday, September 13, 2026. Look for a more detailed email and blog post regarding our early enrollment program in early July.
Thank you for reading through the above – we know there is a lot here but we have found that things run more smoothly when everyone is on the same page! Again, if you’d like to watch the pre-summer webinar, you may do so HERE. Please don’t hesitate to be in touch by email (info@apogeeadventures.com) or phone (207-725-7025) if you have questions about the above or anything else in advance of your child’s trip.
Thank you very much – we are looking forward to welcoming your child to their Apogee program soon!