Like the principal stated, it should be mandatory for students, at any every age, to take at least one, if not more, extracurricular activity and here's why.

Students are growing, no matter if you're in kindergarten or a senior in high school, you are always growing both physically and mentally. As you grow, a lot begins to change in the world around you and extracurricular activities can help you adapt to these new changes. Your health is very important as you grow and maintaining and getting into good shape is vital to a students well being. Extracurricular activities such as conditioning, basketball, football, track, lacrosse, and other sports get you into good shape and keep you healthy. Other activities such as Shop and Home EC. teach you the necessities to life that you might not learn from anyone else. Learning to sew and cook, as well as build and repair objects, are incredibly important, especially when you buy a house, get a job, and have a family of your own.

Some activities such as Chess Club and D&D Club creates a new mentality and way of thinking, allowing you to learn tactics and strategy in not only the game but also the ability to attack and solve problems in the real world at different angles. Journalism improves your writing skills as you create, edit, and re-edit your article. Journalism let's you traverse the schools grounds in search of a good story or the perfect interview to not only entertain your readers and fellow students, but also to keep them posted on current events and state of the all the things happening around them in school and it's community. Working on the yearbook immerses you into the schools community, lets you make new friendships, and create cherished memories for students and teachers to look back on for the rest of time. Such things as Homework Club let you get a jump start on homework so you can spend more time with friends and family as well as increasing the time you get to do the things you love. Math Counts and Science Olympiad keeps your brain in peak performance as you review and practice, but also learn and constantly improve your intellect and stretch your brain. Other activities, such as Debate, let you sharpen your wit, improve your ability to speak in front of an audience , advance one's argument skills, compromising skills, and working with your team to find good evidence and construct the best argument possible to defeat the opposing viewpoint.

As much as these activities offer, one of the most important and crucial to students everywhere is the social experience and friends you gain. No matter what activity you participate in, you are always working with or against someone. These experiences can bring people close and let you make new friends with people you'd never met before. These people can become some of your best friends because the fact that they take that activity with you means that they probably share at least one interest with the you. I have experience with this effect myself. I live in a place where the district border of Generic_School and Generic_School, and Generic_School and Generic_School basically goes through my house. When the end of sixth grade rolled around and it was time to move on to Middle school I had a really hard time leaving. Because of this divide with the border, all the friends I had known for seven years (including kindergarten) went to Generic_School while I went to Generic_School. I had horrible anxiety and depression moving away from them, knowing I may never see some of them again and going to school that I was criminally under prepared for. Well as it turns out, my parents were much more prepared for this than I was. Years before they had signed me up for Generic_School sports instead of Generic_City sports (what all my friends did). Because I played on Generic_School lacrosse teams, basketball teams, and swim teams, I got to make a whole lot of friends from my teammates and even Generic_School athletes I had competed against. This made the transition from a place where I had spent seven years of my life with friends I had known more than half my life, to a place that I knew nothing about and barely anyone to talk to, a breeze. It was still hard to say good bye to my friends and I still didn't know many people, but the friends I had made from those sports and the new friends I made from things like D&D Club and Homework Club made middle school a fun and welcoming place.

Extracurricular activities offer a lot of learning, reviewing, improvement, health benefits, social skills, organization, feelings of pride and accomplishment, helping other students, and jump start on homework, but also so much more. These activities create cherished memories and life long friends. They help you find parts of you and interests you never even knew you had. They help you find yourself and find others to help you strive along the journey of life and overcome it's most challenging obsticals.

In retrospect, these activities offer so much more then what meets the eye and that's why it should be mandatory for every student at every age, to take at least one or more extracurricular activity.