Deb Doherty, veteran performing arts instructor at Bonny Eagle High School in Standish, is taking drama club students on a weekend visit to attend Broadway performances in New York City.

The group includes 16 high school students, a couple of middle schoolers and one elementary student.

“I’m excited to take them,” Doherty recently told Westbrook-Gorham Now. “It sets their expectations higher.”

The group from Maine School Administrative District 6 — known as Bonny Eagle, with students from Buxton, Frye Island, Hollis, Limington and Standish — will travel by Amtrak and leave Portland on Friday, Jan. 30, and return Sunday, Feb. 1. They will stay in a hotel right in the heart of the city’s theater district and dine in a unique restaurant with a singing waitstaff.

The students are paying their expenses out of their own pockets with some help from corporate sponsors, Doherty said.

Superintendent Clay Gleason, in an email, praised Doherty’s work with the students and making the trip possible. “It is a great opportunity for Bonny Eagle students to experience the sights, sounds and culture New York City has to offer,” Gleason said. “In the short time they are there, students will be able to take in three Broadway performances as well as visit the Museum of Broadway.”

The group will attend the award-winning musical, “Wicked,” and meet with a few cast members, including Doherty’s daughter, Meg Doherty, who is billed as making her Broadway debut with the show.

Some of the cast will be available for a question-and-answer session with students and four of the “hardworking students,” Deb Doherty said, will be afforded an opportunity to even visit the cast backstage.

Other Broadway shows they will attend are “The Play That Goes Wrong” and the musical “Death Becomes Her.”

Doherty said the experience will give the Bonny Eagle students a broader sense of the world. “They see what’s possible, it helps them to grow,” Doherty said.

Doherty is familiar with New York as she and her husband frequently travel there.

She will be assisted with five adults as chaperones on the trip. “I’m not crazy,” Doherty said when asked whether other adults would travel with the group. “I’m not setting (the students) free (at Times Square).”