The "general practice" as described by Brian is pretty-well served for trips as currently designed. By extension, it also works fairly well for field trips that are part of courses.

That said, committee leaders and course coordinators have responsibilities that are broader than a single field trip. I support this suggestion, if for no other reason, it makes the jobs of our course coordinators easier.

Note that currently, emergency contact information does NOT appear on ANY roster. Further, the process to reveal it is obscure: click on the Print button then cancel then print. Who would guess? Also, disconcerting--at least to me--the print button prints something besides what is visible when you click it. And some rosters do not even have a Print button. (yes, I know you can print from the Download button. But again, who would guess?)

I want to suggest a more comprehensive change that I believe satisfies Brian's idea plus adds some usability enhancements. Here goes:

1. Consolidate the "Print" and "Download" buttons to a single button labelled "Print/Download Preview". Show that button on EVERY roster page.

2. Make th preview page more-or-less WYSIWYG: showing all the fields that will be printed and not showing any that won't be printed.

3. Give the preview page "Copy", "Download" and "Print" buttons, just like the download page now. And continue to support sorting by clicking on the column headers, just like the download page does now.

4. To minimize page width, combine some fields can into one column. For example: combine 5 address fields to 1 column, combine 3 phone number fields to 1 column, and so forth. Do not combine first and last name because they are useful for sorting.

5. Preferably, format the preview to a single landscape width. But if it doesn't fit, then print everything on extra pages instead of discarding the part that overflows the page, as happens now.

6. Add emergency contact info to Course Rosters and perhaps even Committee Rosters. I don't really see a need for it on Course Template Rosters, but someone else may.

Peter, if I understand you correctly, I would say no, there is not enough need and too high of privacy concerns to share students' (or trip participants') emergency contact info with other students (or trip participants). On a trip, the general practice is supposed to be, the Leader has access to all participant contact info and their emergency contacts. The leader creates a roster, carrying one hardcopy on the trip, and providing a 2nd copy to the "trip emergency focal". If there is an emergency or the party is otherwise delayed in returning beyond a set time, the trip emergency focal calls 911 and all the participants' emergency contacts. Sometimes the Leader informs participants who the trip emergency contact is, such that participants' families have someone to contact if they are worried - perhaps this should be done more often, but other than that I think that part is fine. Main point of the suggestion is, we don't have a good system of having emergency contact info - for students or instructors - on course field trips.

great idea, related to this would be to make contract information availbe to students through some means to allow each participant to leave behind an emergency contact list for friends or family members. Part of trip planning for all partipants should be to leave a trip itinerary, location and emergency contact information for family members or friends not going on the trip should you be delayed from returning. I realizes there are some privacy concerns, but right now I have to gather that information through private emailing of other participants and manually write in the information on a trip to leave with my wife. It would be nice if there was some automatically generated "emergency contact" list and itinerary perhaps, for participants to leave behind so if nothing else, should the plans change or the group is delayed a day or two returning, family members will have a place to check on the status if there had been a delay or an actual emergency.

(The current "workaround" is for course field trip leaders to download & print their own Activity Rosters for their individual field trips. This is an unnecessary & redundant task for field trip leaders, as a master Student roster & Instructor roster can be created a single time by the committee and sent to field trip leaders. Activity Rosters & associated emergency contact info are also prone to being incomplete if students & instructors neglect to "register" online for participating in field trips.)