Imagine, one day you're at school, and you hear over the loudspeaker that all students in the building must report immediately to the Lecture Hall, for some new "adjustments". Although you are a bit surprised by this sudden announcement, you walk towards the Lecture Hall at a leisurely pace (as if you were anticipating something like this to happen). Once you're there, you sit in a chair and wait for all the other students to come rushing in like a stampede of wildebeests. After everything settles down, the principal picks up a mic from a lectern on the stage and starts a speech. In this speech, he talks about how the after school clubs are experiencing a steep decline in the number of students that attend them. He presents the crowd with a solution to this problem, a solution that is greeted with some harsh criticism from the majority of the student body. He says that, in order to keep the after school program alive, all students will be forced to participate in at least one extracurricular activity, and that all students who chose to not follow this new rule will be expelled. Bewildered by this, you yell out in protest of this new policy, but to no avail. For the principal has already left the stage, and now you have to be a part of one of those worthless, unnecessary, and boring after school clubs. As you can see, it is detrimental, to both the students and the school as a whole, to force all of the students in a school into participation in an after school activity. Due to a plethora of factors along with the one I just described, I wholeheartedly disagree with my principal on forcing every student in the school to attend an after school club. If you don't believe me already(in regards with this issue at my school), then hopefully the following paragraphs will succeed in persuading you.

First of all, making it mandatory for all students in a school to attend at least one club takes away some of their freedom with how they experience their lives. By this, I mean that, by forcing students to go to an after school club, you are limiting their options for what they can do after school is over. This is due to the simple fact that, once the student chooses their club(s), the time that that club occupies can't really be used for anything else and takes up a big chunk of the student's schedule. To give context, allow me to give you an example. Lets say that Generic_Name, a seventh grader, decided to take

Quiz Bowl as his extracurricular activity. Immediately all regular activities from 2:30- 5:30 are canceled. In addition to this, he now has to go to some weekend meetings, resulting in him not have time to hang out with his friends anymore, study for school, do all of his homework, or go to the gym. Instead, he now has to guess answers to random questions about the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and wait till about 6:00 PM to get picked up by his bus, and then dropped off at home at almost 7:00 PM, completely exhausted and burned out. As, you can hopefully see, having to do even just one after school activity can take a lot time out of a students life, and in extension a lot of freedom with their life.

Second of all, with this new policy, transportation can become an incredibly detrimental issue for students that suddenly have to take at least one extracurricular activity. This is because there will always be some students in a school who can't take the bus and have parents that work too far away to be able to pick them up, making it nearly impossible for those students to get home safely, or on time. In addition to this, transportation can be a huge issue in the fact that, with

ALL

students having to take an after school activity, on any given day, buses could have to leave behind some students because of a shortage of seats, leaving those who were left behind with no options to get back home. For example, let's say that all the students decide to participate in an extracurricular activity on the same day. With all of those students, it would be near impossible for them all to get a bus ride home. And because of all the parents that have to work during the time that those students would get picked up, the school would be left with a large crowd of students that have no way of getting home on time.

Finally, this policy will probably create a harmful school environment. By this, I mean that it would result in a multitude of considerably hard-to-deal-with problems. Such problems would be: an unmotivated student body, protesting from parents, and an unproductive student body. The lower school morale may stem from anger in students at the principal, and teachers that are exhausted from being overworked due to the fact that most of them will have to host at least one after school club; the parents might complain due to the fact that they won't be able to interact with their children as much, and because they might not like the discontent in their children; and unproductivity would be caused by students burning out from the extra time that they have to spend in school. In addition to all of these problems, students might also try to not participate in extracurricular activities resulting in extreme punishments(i. e expulsion).

To wrap it all up, there are a lot of reasons as to why my principal's new policy on extracurricular activities isn't very great. It limits a students freedom, it can't really function due to the lack of transportation that is needed for all of the students, and it creates a bad school environment. For these reasons, I think that the principal shouldn't have made this policy.