Once more, it’s that time of year. The time when we set alarm clocks to wake up early and stay up late to finish an essay or study for a test instead of doing leisure activities. It’s also the time when your parents will get an email about how activity fees are due and frequent announcements to remind you to tell your parents to pay them. So why do we have to pay these fees? We pay these fees in order to “supplement a student’s experience through materials and activities,” according to Ontario.ca. In other words, the money collected from these fees goes toward funding spirit days, classroom supplies, and—most importantly—extracurricular activities.
But is this how these school fees actually work? Do the funds received actually go toward helping each and every student? Well, the first loophole I found was that they call these fees “voluntary”. This, in effect, implies to students that if they don’t pay these fees, they won’t be able to participate in their chosen activity, voluntarily. These payments are often due in the first few weeks of classes and range from $10 to $30 per student. While doing my research, I came to find out that these activities fees are used for everyone’s extracurricular activities. To put it differently, it means that if you decide you don’t want to take part in any of these activities, your money is still going to be used for another student’s activity. Without this system in place, each student would have to pay for any activity they wished to take part in, with some students having to pay nothing at all and others possibly having to pay up to $50, depending on how many activities they desired to take part in. For me, I can’t decide between these two options. A student should be able to participate in any activity without worrying if their parents will be able to afford it but someone else’s parents shouldn’t be paying for other children’s activities. I chose to consider the idea of having no activity charge, but that made me come to the conclusion that there would be no activities at all.
From this whole experience, I learned one thing. Public schools are not really free. Sure you get the education but do you really get the whole experience? We know that many universities/colleges look at the extracurricular activities that you took part in so there is no running away from that. Not only that, do we really want to go to school to sit at a desk for 6 hours with no cool activities? No labs, no art projects, no spirit days and, worst of all, no extracurricular activities?
THE NORTH STAR 