Extracurriculars are No Longer Extra

By Caillou Dasalla

As a high schooler, I was privileged enough to attend a relatively well-to-do public school, Castro Valley High School. Go Trojans! However, while the school was largely middle class and many students merited high marks, it was palpable among even the most achieved at my school that A’s were not gonna cut it. Across the school, you could find students bedraggled by restless nights of homework and sports, hurried AP students, and freshmen sporting stress induced grey hairs. The climate was often tense and cut-throat, especially around club officer election season. And with good reason.

My peers and I were well aware that to prove competitive in applying to schools, jobs, and internships of choice before graduation, we had to compete with one another for club and leadership positions — many of which were few and far between. And therein lies a major issue with our public education system.

As any teen student knows, the grind of high school does not simply start and end inside the classroom. More and more, students are expected by institutions of higher learning and employment to be studious and outgoing. Whereas in the past a high school education and a 4.0 were enough to prove your mettle, that is no longer the case. Nowadays, you must have straight-A’s, a job, a story, a cause, a passion, and be salutatorian, if not valedictorian, all by the age of 17 or 18. And while this is the case, schools and state budget-setters don’t yet seem to know that it is.

While non-profit clubs and sports abound in schools, the funds to support them are typically not as abundant. Students and parents must empty their own pockets, purses, and wallets to afford them, and consequently, their future prospects. Public schools in California do not pay into these extracurriculars, bar profitable and esteemed football programs, yet they are increasingly becoming as fundamental to self-actualization as an education is.

Extracurriculars, as expensive and out of reach as they can be, offer vital vocational skills and life skills which the classroom setting cannot provide. They help students become self-starters, entrepreneurial, and passionate about things greater than themselves. And for all the benefits they give to our kids, one would think they would be a beneficiary of education spending. But, alas, they are not.

California must grow with the times and the expectations of society. Curricular spending must now include extracurricular forethought. By realizing better funding for schooling as a whole, California can free up school administrators to better manage and produce extracurricular opportunities. This would help universalize the advantageous opportunity which extracurriculars represent for all students — irregardless of race, class, geography, and disprivilege.