Many students are involved in multiple after-school activities that allow them to express their interests. Annandale does a great job at providing a wide variety of activities to its students but they lack a good time system that can efficiently let everyone attend all of their after-school programs.

Students are struggling with participating in all of their favorite hobbies because of the many club sponsors that decide to hold meetings all on the same day.

Mondays and Wednesdays are consistently the prime days that clubs meet due to the after-school buses that are provided only on those days. It’s absurd to have the county assign after-school buses on only two days of the week. This restricts students from being able to attend all of their favorite hobbies.

Honor societies are being held on the same days along with many other clubs like Arabic club, Ethiopian and Eritrean Association, Black Student Union, and more. “As someone with many interests, I am a part of a lot of clubs and honor societies.

Most of these after-school activities are held on either Mondays or Wednesdays and it has been extremely difficult to attend them all.” Senior Tsion Abate said.

Students are being forced to sacrifice one activity for the other and it should never come to this. What is the point of having numerous clubs that all differ from each other if people are just going to have to pick a few to continuously participate in? “I don’t think that it’s the club sponsor’s faults but rather the rules set around them,” Abate said.
Club sponsors should not be blamed for these terribly planned meet dates.

The county only providing two days out of the week that provides after-school buses is what is at fault.
The county should assign more days to our school that gives out after-school buses if they want to see students fully participate in all of their interests.

Having after school buses on all five school days is understandably unreasonable due to the current bus shortage, but even adding one more day will fix things slightly. An additional after-school bus on Thursdays will allow another day that holds meetings and this will allow sponsors to spread out their schedules.

Of course, there are going to be times where choosing one club meeting over another will be inevitable but it shouldn’t be happening so constantly.

“I find myself always picking between Black Student Union and Ethiopian Eritrean Association. I love both clubs equally but I have to pick between one every Wednesday and I hate missing meetings I genuinely enjoy.” Senior Hayat said.

Continuously missing club meetings can lead to being left in the dark about certain activities and also not being qualified enough to hold a leadership position. This makes it incredibly hard for students with multiple passions to be leaders in their clubs if they aren’t able to attend a majority of the meetings.

Additional downsides to this would be that club sponsors might fall under the impression that a member does not value their club enough. Teachers may understand that students have other clubs to attend to but at a certain point, the absences become unreasonable.

Adding an additional day can also help clubs meet more consistently rather than every other week.
Clubs have agreed to meet every other Wednesday or Monday and alternate their meet days rather than meeting every week.

Although this is a nice solution, it also creates the problem of a long buffer time between each meet date.
This buffer time can cause students to forget a decent amount of what was discussed in the previous meeting, especially considering how busy students can be.

The shortening of clubs has also been a recent problem. With so many clubs meeting after school on all the same days, sponsors feel the need to shorten each meeting from about one hour to around 30-45 minutes.
This half an hour to 15-minute difference is causing clubs to feel rushed and is not providing adequate time to fully discuss all the portions within a club.

With an extra after-school bus on Thursdays, the stress on our club sponsors and students will somewhat be relieved and provide an easygoing after-school experience.