Does sitting inside and doing nothing but homework and chores all day sound exciting? Or would you rather have an opportunity to do fun activities with other people, making friends and improving your health along the way? If the latter sounds like the more appealing option, than you should support our principal's decision to make taking an extracurricular program mandatory. Requiring students to participate in an extracurricular activity is the perfect choice for our school. That is because it opens up new and unexpected opportunities, provides an outlet to make new friends, and helps improve your physical and mental well being.

You should support the requirement of an extracurricular because it opens up fun and enjoyable activities that you might not have come across if not for this new policy. A very sporty kid might never know that he really enjoys being on the student council unless he tries it, and it is unlikely that he would try it any other way. The same thing works inversely, a book-smart kid could really have a great time playing basketball or football and never know it unless he tries it. The new opportunities can also help your in-school life by helping you learn about certain topics that you are struggling in or by providing service hours to contribute towards your required amount. The activity would also be a place to go every time you would rather not go home or if you just preferred to stay after school with your friends.

The same way that this policy provides an outlet to new activities that you might not have found otherwise, it also paves the way to making you friends that you wouldn't have been friends with in any other situation. If you are a new addition to a certain group and you feel lost with how much more accustomed everyone else is to the group, you could make friends with an elder statesmen type of the group, in a mentor-apprentice kind of way. Many times, you could find people who are in the same situation that you are. If you got to know them and started working together with them, you could both benefit by learning how the group works. Overall, it would just be a fantastic way to gain friends, especially with people who are having a hard time getting to know new people.

Another great way that this program is going to help is how it improves your physical and mental health. School can get very stressful at times, and the amount of homework, studying, test-taking, and other school things on top of the everyday teenage problems that you have can start to feel draining, like a heavy weight being pushed down on you. Extracurricular programs relieve a lot of that stress by being a place where you can slow down a little bit and be more involved in things you actually enjoy being involved in. The physical activities, such as baseball or basketball, are a great place to get some exercise in to improve your physical life. A lot of students this age have it rough in that they might not have a lot of friends or people to talk to, so just a simple activity like the yearbook club could help relieve an immense amount of emotional weight off of that student by actually giving them someone to talk about their problems to.

The intelligent choice by our principal to make at least one extracurricular program mandatory is an incredibly beneficial choice to all who are involved. It is a policy that gives people new chances to find something that they like doing, helps students make friends with people that they likely wouldn't have otherwise, and improves the physical and mental health of those students who need the improvement. If you are for the well-being of students and the developmental growth of the people who are the future of our nation, then you should be for this policy.