SEQUIM — Parents of students in Sequim High School’s Ambassador Choir have decided to cancel a trip to Normandy, France, where they were to have performed at a festival in early June.
The event, commemorating the 60th anniversary of D-Day — the invasion of Allied troops during World War II — spans 80 days, but the eight-day school trip was scheduled during graduation week.
That alone was enough to dissuade many of the choir’s seniors from signing up, said Anneka Morgan, a graduating senior who said she’d love to go to France any other time.
“It’s just awkward,” Morgan said Saturday. “I felt it was poorly planned.”
Morgan was one of several seniors who decided to skip the tour and participate in the graduation ceremonies.
Plans for the trip seemed to raise questions for parents ever since choir director Dave Cross first mentioned it in 2003.
“It was understood that the festival organizers had invited (the choir),” said Peggy Kelly, whose 15-year-old daughter Amanda signed up for the trip.
“I was pretty disappointed when I found out that wasn’t the case,” Kelly said.
So was Sequim Schools Superintendent Garn Christensen, who said he was led to believe the organizers singled out the Ambassador choir and invited the group as the sole representative of Washington state.
Instead, Christensen discovered, the trip was arranged through a nationwide travel company that organizes trips for school performances.
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The rest of the story appears in the Sunday Peninsula Daily News Clallam County edition.