EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES FORPHYSICAL EDUCATION

Students should be allowed to substitute extracurricular activities for physical education

Students should be allowed to substitute extracurricular activities for physical education

There are many reasons students should be allowed in extracurricular sports.  As a freshman in high school, I joined the tennis team because it was something I enjoyed.  Numerous friends of mine had joined the football team in order to gain a feeling of “brotherhood” and a sense of belonging.  Participation in extracurricular athletics is a positive and constructive activity that students have the unique opportunity to become involved in throughout high school.  In 1992, sports had the largest participation out of all extracurricular activities, with forty-two percent of seniors participating in at least one varsity sport (Extracurricular Participation and Student Engagement).  For the 2004-2005 school year, 7,018,709 students across the country participated in varsity high school athletics (2004-05 NFHS High School Athletics Participation Survey). 

As the Plainedge Board of Education, I know that it is your job to try and make a decision regarding the continuation of extracurricular athletics at Plainedge High School.  You each must ask yourself: will the students be negatively affected if school sports are discontinued?  Although it may not perfectly fit in the budget to continue to sponsor and pay for sports, there are other ways for these activities to be funded.  It is up to you, the members of the Plainedge Board of Education, to decide whether athletics are significant enough to find the means to fund these activities.  Supreme Court Justice Byron White once said, “Sports and other forms of vigorous physical activity provide educational experience which cannot be duplicated in the classroom.  They are an uncompromising laboratory in which we must think and act quickly and efficiently under pressure and then force us to meet our own inadequacies face-to-face and to do something about them, as nothing else does (The Effects of High School Athletic Participation on Education and Labor Market Outcomes).”  As Justice White believed, athletics are an integral part of education.  Extracurricular athletics not only teach students life lessons, such as how to work under pressure and how to work as a team, but students who participate in varsity athletics are more likely to attend postsecondary school, be employed full time, and participate in physical fitness activities (as an adult) than non-athletes.

In the past two years, nine graduating seniors from Plainedge High School went on to sign contracts to play a varsity sport during college (Long Island High School Senior Commitments).  Although that is a small number, it cannot be known how many students decided to play club and intramural sports at their respective colleges.  In 2005 alone, Plainedge High School graduated two hundred and twenty one students.  Out of these two hundred and twenty one students, eighty-four percent of them went to postsecondary school (a two or four-year college or university) (2005 Newsday High School Report Card). 

Student-athletes have greater success throughout the duration of high school than those who do not participate in extracurricular ...