Just days from now, seven Baltimore City eighth-graders, their teacher, and a documentarian will journey to one of the farthest reaches of the earth: Antarctica.
It sounds like an episode of the animated children’s show “The Magic School Bus” – and their teacher, Sabina Sully, possesses all the educational wonder of Ms. Frizzle – but for the students at Patterson Park Public Charter School, this voyage will be incredibly real.
“What I want most for them from this trip is to come back with a vision of themselves as explorers and scientists and people that can communicate big ideas both effectively and with passion,” Sully said.
The vision for the Antarctica trip surfaced in 2024 when Sully was a Grosvenor Teacher Fellow through National Geographic Lindblad Expeditions, a program that allowed her to travel with a small collection of teachers to the Patagonia region at the southern tip of South America.
At Karukinka National Park in Tierra del Fuego, Sully recalls seeing some of the most beautiful sights: hulking mountains, a pod of elephant seals, and even a king penguin.
But she also witnessed something unsettling in this remote natural reserve: bright, blue plastic trash that had washed ashore.
Upon returning to Baltimore, Sully was determined to not only share what she learned with her students, but to make it possible for them to experience something like it themselves.
“When we’re thinking about places that are so remote and so far removed, sometimes it can be hard, especially for young people, to understand the ways that their lives are interconnected with these places that feel so alien and so foreign.”
Sully thought a trip to Antarctica could be a difficult pitch; she was surprised when everyone got on board with the idea.
“I had really thought everyone was going to laugh me out of the room, like ‘Kids to Antarctica? What are you talking about?’ But everybody that I met with was just so excited about the program,” she said.
With the support of National Geographic Lindblad Expeditions, her school, and numerous sponsors, the trip materialized from dream to reality.
In spring 2024, Patterson Park Public Charter School put out an interest form to their middle schoolers. By the fall of 2025, Sully had 25 students interested in being part of this polar exploration class.
But it wasn’t as easy as students getting their parents or guardians to sign a permission slip. Students needed the proper documentation to travel on a trip of this scale. They also needed to write an essay, obtain a recommendation letter from a teacher, and participate in a panel interview. The group was then narrowed down to the final expedition team.
In addition to the seven students who will be traveling to Antarctica, an eighth student member of the expedition team will be staying back and serving as the team’s science communicator. That student will receive content from her peers in the field, which she will use to develop videos that will go out daily to their school community.
While in Antarctica, the students will be filming their experiences on vlogging cameras. They will also be equipped with 360-degree cameras that will be used to create a virtual reality experience, in collaboration with Towson University’s electronic media and film department, so eventually other students and community members from Baltimore and beyond will be able to experience Antarctica through VR technology.
Students will use a Forward-Looking Infrared (FLIR) camera to capture thermal images of icebergs. They will then contribute those images to Joe Muise’s citizen science program “Thermal Imaging of Polar Ice.” Muise, a National Geographic Grosvenor Teacher Fellow in Canada, is building a long-term dataset with the help of citizen scientists to track temperature changes in icebergs across polar environments.
Documentary filmmaker John Wesby has also been capturing the preparations for the trip and will be accompanying the team to Antarctica to document their experiences there, which he will turn into a documentary titled “From Baltimore to the Bottom of the World.”
Wesby and his wife have been friends with Sully ever since they chaperoned their children’s trips with Sully to other destinations, including Ecuador, Greece, Machu Picchu in Peru, and Angkor Wat in Cambodia.
Trips like these will have a lasting impact on the students for the rest of their lives, Wesby said.
“These travel-abroad trips are planting seeds, and we won’t necessarily see that seed grow until years from now,” he said. “But when a person is exposed to something different and something outside of their norm, it changes their perspective, oftentimes for the better, and you create a more well-rounded person.”
Currently, Wesby is teaching film production to high schoolers at Wide Angle Youth Media Works. He said he’s drawn to documentary filmmaking because the medium centers authenticity, a value he hopes students will share.
“With the documentary format, this is a snapshot of a moment in time that will never occur again, and it’s the honest truth…. You’re telling the story of what has affected that subject, and in its purest form, there’s no ulterior motive behind it. It’s telling the truth and showing that person as they are and the story that they have to tell,” he said.
In the leadup to the expedition, Sully’s students have volunteered in their community, from scrubbing oysters to reading to elementary schoolers about Antarctica and talking to them about emperor penguins, which the International Union for Conservation of Nature added to their list of endangered species.
The school also partnered with the National Aquarium so the students could learn about connections between Baltimore and Antarctica. For example, they learned about keystone species, like Antarctic krill and the oyster beds here in the city.
“Often these smallest species are the ones that are the foundation for an entire ecosystem,” Sully said. “[They learned] how important it is that, even though they aren’t the flashy animals that we think of when we think about conservation, they are the ones that without them the whole system is going to crumble.”
Similarly, some of Baltimore’s youngest residents will have a ripple effect far beyond the city as they share what they learn.
The idea of representing Baltimore abroad has been a special point of pride for many of the students, Sully said.
“For a number of the students, they have talked a lot about how representation is really important, and the idea of being able to help other students in the city see students that look like them, sound like them, achieving these things is a really big deal and something they feel really, really proud about.”
Wesby is excited to share the documentary with the community once the expedition is over – and he’s happy to give the children a record of the memories they built.
He’s looking forward to “being able to capture this for the families and for the community, and even for these children. They’ll be able to then show their kids the time when mom or dad was an eighth-grader and traveled to Antarctica.”
The Patterson Park school group will be among about 109 people aboard the National Geographic Explorer ship, including couples, families, solo travelers, scientists, National Geographic photographers, and the crew of the ship itself.
Embarking on their trip Nov. 15, they will be gone for about two weeks, including through the Thanksgiving holiday. Along the way, they will spend a night in Buenos Aires where the students will participate in a food tour and get to see the city. They will also spend time in Ushuaia, Argentina, on the southern coast of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego.
From there, it will be about a two-day sail across the Drake Passage before the travelers get to the Antarctic Peninsula, where they will then spend about four to five days, moving to different spots based on weather and conditions.
Finally, they will sail home from King George Island through Port Natalia, Chile, on the road to Santiago, and then back to Baltimore.
While in Antarctica, the group will ride small inflatables watercraft called Zodiacs, which can take passengers near icebergs and through places where a large ship wouldn’t be able to visit. There will be opportunities to do cross-country skiing and a polar plunge.
“The water is very cold,” Sully said. “I’ve been told your brain essentially just shuts down.”
There are strict regulations around biosecurity in Antarctica, so passengers will go through foot-washing areas when coming on and off the ship.
“When you’re actually on the Antarctic continent, essentially nothing but the soles of your feet can be touching the ground because you really want to be minimizing bringing any type of foreign, invasive, problematic anything with you,” Sully said.
Although they will leave little physical trace of their presence in Antarctica, Sully hopes her students will come away from the expedition inspired to be changemakers for good.
“Everything I hear is that it’s a place that changes you, that it can’t be replicated in any way, and the immensity of it is really hard to conceptualize,” she said. “I don’t know that there’s a single scientific idea that I need any of them to come home with so much as a sense of passion and purpose to be advocates for our earth and to know that they have the power, not just to make individual choices for themselves, but to influence change on a much larger level.”
