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Looking at the Champions list of University Interscholastic League (UIL) Debate competitors in Texas, there seems to be an odd peculiarity since 2015. There are six champions every year for the 1A-6A competition brackets, and each of these divisions partition out schools in the state of Texas by size. On paper, this seems a little odd that they would make such a strange categorization, but when it comes to rural schools, it’s anything but. The urban-rural divide has been deepening, especially when it comes to equitable access for extracurricular activities for students in rural schools. In this sense, the Texas UIL’s decision to split up competition brackets by school size is a good band-aid fix, but it’s not addressing the core root of the issue of highly inequitable access to quality extracurriculars for students of rural schools.
Why Inequity Particularly Affects Rural Schools
There are many key reasons as to why rural schools face this issue. Most importantly, rural schools simply lack funding for varied extracurricular ventures. As the previous blog posts touched upon, rural schools tend to have significantly less funding than other schools due to poor federal/state aid and lower property taxes funding their schools. Therefore, rural schools have limited resources to provide for extracurricular activities. It can cost $20,000 for a single after-school extracurricular activity, according to an article from Edsource. This $20,000 figure includes the staffing requirement, resources that the activity provides, as well as transportation for the students such as school buses. The last issue is a particularly important one: rural schools can lack the transportation infrastructure to help students get home after these activities. Rural school districts can cover much more landmass than urban/suburban school districts, simply because rural areas are much more spread out. Students can live miles away from each other, and it isn’t always feasible to transport all of these students back home after extracurricular activities. A single school bus might have to travel miles to drop off a few students, and that extra distance requires a lot of fuel and money to staff the drivers.
Although rural schools tend to have high participation rates in the activities they do offer, this fact obscures the picture that rural students lack variety in the activities they participate in. Although the students do participate in the activities that are offered to them (such as sports and music), this ignores the picture that they’re left out of so many activities common to other schools, such as special interest ECs. To elucidate the lack of variety, attached below is a figure showing how smaller rural schools in Ontario offer specific activities at much lower rates than larger schools.
From the graph, it can be seen that rural schools offer many popular activities at lower rates than non-rural schools. Although rural schools offer activities like sports and music at similar rates as non-rural schools, the divide particularly widens when it comes to special interest clubs or other particularly resource-intensive activities (STEM, robotics, academic competitions, etc). For some of these activities, the difference in the number of rural vs non-rural schools offering these activities can be wider than 10%, as seen in the above graph. A lack of extracurricular variety can be problematic for students that seek specific skills or resources from extracurricular activities that their schools can’t or don’t already provide. For example, the cost of a computer science or a robotics program may be out of reach for a rural school, inhibiting their students’ abilities to gain key skills or interests before college or a job. Robotics clubs can cost tens of thousands of dollars for schools for all the necessary equipment and competition fees, according to an article from Finmodelslab. Students may never find out about their passion for social justice, environmental clubs, or robotics if they are never offered an opportunity to engage with them.
The Pandemic and Extracurricular Access
There’s also the matter of how the COVID-19 pandemic plays into extracurricular access. During and after the pandemic, many schools cut funding for activities and reallocated them into academic pursuits, believing that catching up on lost learning was the number one priority. Many activities have lost significant amounts of funding because of the pandemic. But beyond just access, students don’t seem to value extracurriculars as much.
Source: https://cosmostudy.uk/latest/reduced-engagement-in-extra-curricular-activities-post-pandemic
A study in the UK done by Cosmo found that 26% of students stopped all extracurricular activities after the pandemic. Extracurricular participation and accessibility has still not recovered four years after the pandemic, and it doesn’t seem clear why. But it can likely be attributed to reduced access as well as reduced interest from students after the pandemic. Funding for key extracurricular activities has plummeted since the pandemic, and many schools have stopped offering some activities altogether. Furthermore, some students may just not be as inclined to join extracurriculars anymore, as they’ve become accustomed to online interactions in the wake of the pandemic; for many students, in-person interaction just isn’t as familiar or necessary as it once may have been according to an article from the NEAToday journal.
However, it’s not all bad news: Internet access in rural areas has greatly improved since the onset of the pandemic, owing to online learning expansion. Therefore, schools can leverage technology to increase extracurricular participation and use technology to provide unique solutions.
Benefits of Extracurricular Participation for Students
What is the benefit of extracurricular participation for students? It’s not just the ability to gain practical skills that students are losing. Extracurricular participation is highly correlated with higher academic performance, such as higher test scores and GPAs. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, EC participation is also associated with much lower absenteeism rates, higher graduation rates, as well as an increased desire to attend higher education after high school completion, which are all issues that particularly affect rural schools. Extracurricular participation can’t be ignored if we want to prioritize students’ success in the classroom. Furthermore, students’ mental health is shown to greatly improve when they participate in extracurriculars. Participation is closely linked to a widespread quality of life and improvements in success according to the Frontiers Sports and Active Living journal.
So then, what can be done? We need to work with new opportunities, such as expanded Internet access, to leverage unique solutions in a new post-pandemic landscape to help students and schools. We also need to make sure that schools and students both are aware of the tremendous benefits of extracurricular participation, and that they aren’t ignored in favor of the classroom. Students deserve to participate in extracurriculars, and a new technological landscape can provide unique solutions to bolster their participation in these activities.
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