Stricter rules needed to increase club participation

Despite initiatives in the past couple years by club commissioners to increase participation and legitimacy, too many clubs continue to be mostly dead in everything except name. Even then, more and more clubs are still getting approved, which means that there are even more clubs diluting the subpar quality of groups on campus. One obvious problem occurs when students who are interested in clubs that meet on the same day have to choose between the two or three options.

So, what can the school, or at least ASB, do to remedy this problem? The most obvious and effective solution is one that establishes more stringent rules on creating new clubs as well as cracking down on existing clubs that have proven to do little for enriching student lives with a severe lack of current attendance or actual activities.

The school already has around 70 clubs, and while this isn’t to say that the school’s existing clubs don’t cater to the student body’s diverse interests, the large number of clubs, coupled with the evidently decreasing membership numbers, suggests that perhaps there are too many of them. To make matters worse, there are new clubs always being added to this already-long list every year.

The number of clubs that come and go with each passing school year also spells trouble, because it demonstrates a lack of continued commitment to the clubs. Far too often do graduating senior officers neglect their clubs and let them slowly die off near the end of the school year.

On the other hand, eager freshmen are also quick to submit club application forms at the beginning of the following year, leading to a continuous cycle of clubs that never stay permanent. If anything, this lack of many permanent clubs can also be a reason for student apathy when it comes to attendance numbers — if there is no standing tradition with many of the established clubs, then it’s hard for the newer ones to gain a foothold and subsequently attract more students.

To combat this problem, stricter rules, which would establish a better vetting process to separate those who are making clubs to fill an extra line on their college application resumes and those who are truly passionate about their club’s goals, could serve the school well in putting an end to the four-year cycle that clubs seem to currently be undergoing.

Likewise, ASB could use a method to consolidate or simply reduce the sheer number of clubs that already exist, which could, in turn, see a gradual increase in membership for the ones that remain. ASB could also put a cap on the maximum number of clubs each year so that clubs applying for approval would need to include legitimate plans for club activities in their applications.

In addition to these two major changes that could potentially revamp the school’s club attendance for the better, the school could also bring back the big, printed calendars that were used last year to tell students the days when certain clubs were meeting. That way, officers would not have to worry if their last-minute Facebook post or email was buried with all the other notifications or never seen at all. And, for the students who barely use social media or check their emails, perhaps the printed calendars in the hallways would be the only way they could know about upcoming club meetings.

None of these arguments are to say that ASB isn’t doing their job properly or that there is still much to be desired. ASB has already slowly been moving in the right direction when it comes to approving new clubs and placing checks on old ones —  the stricter rules created by the club commissioners in the last couple of years have demonstrated just that. However, if the ASB were to make club acceptance requirements even tougher, students would have to choose from fewer — but perhaps more active — clubs.