The Unfortunate Implications of Mandatory Club Involvement by Audrey

The Unfortunate Implications of Mandatory Club Involvement by Audrey - October 2015 Scholarship Essay

Recently, there has been a greater push for high schools to require students to be involved in extracurricular activities. There is no denying the positive impact that clubs and academic teams have on students. Students benefit from connecting with one another through common interests and often make life-long friendships as a result. However, it is essential that these activities remain purely optional, without being required for graduation. Otherwise, students may suffer personally or academically.
While some students may have the luxury of time and money to join extracurricular activities, many would not be able to join due to their economic standing. Many students work part-time during high school to pay for gas or to support their families, leaving little time for extracurricular involvement. Others, such as me, are responsible for transporting their younger siblings to and from school. Many teens in either situation are already struggling to keep up with homework and classwork between the lengthy school day and their outside responsibilities.Club and activity options would be very limited students in either situation, leaving some unable to meet their extracurricular requirements from lack of time. A system where students must be involved in extracurricular activities unfairly biased against those without financial security, and may force them to sacrifice the grades they struggle to maintain.
Another problem arises when students with non-traditional enrollment are considered. Many schools around the United States have dual-enrollment programs where students can attend college classes through a local institute of higher education, with some students even pursuing full Associate's Degrees. In these programs, not all students are able to take college classes during the normal school day and be available during club hours. College classes rarely line up perfectly with high school ones, meaning many students are at college in the afternoon or immediately before high school. It would be unrealistic to expect students with non-traditional schedules to be involved in high school extracurricular activities.
In addition to matters of convenience, clubs and activities can be very costly. It is not unusual for music, sports, and other clubs of the competitive variety to require membership and transportation fees for the events they attend as well as uniform and fundraising fees. In some high schools, one year of band can cost roughly five-hundred dollars per student. As a result, students would swarm to no-cost clubs out of both financial necessity and convenience. Book clubs, special interest clubs, and art clubs would be flooded with students who aren’t particularly invested in the club’s activities and are trying to meet a requirement, not enrich their high school experience. Club membership would be skewed in favor of those with no prohibitive cost, leaving adult sponsors of the clubs overwhelmed with students. This would undermine the purpose of the extracurricular activity requirement, as students wouldn’t be bonding and growing through a subject of interest. Clubs would become like any of the required general education class that students loathe.
In summary, requiring students to be involved in extracurricular activities for graduation would be a largely detrimental, and misguided, effort to help students grow academically. For students with outside financial and family responsibilities, having to set aside a club could mean going without gas to get to high school or leaving their sibling without transportation to and from school. Others are simply unavailable during the times when most clubs are held as a result of their non-traditional high school educations. Clubs without prohibitive cost barriers would be overwhelmed with students, devaluing the intent of the extracurricular activity requirement and reducing it to just another check-box on a student’s files. While the intent to enrich students’ lives is wholehearted, requiring extracurricular involvement would be a horribly misguided effort that would end in failure.