Have you heard of Ecology Club? What about Science Bowl? Personally in all four years I’ve spent in high school at ADM I have never heard one announcement about these clubs. What about the clubs that you have heard of that mysteriously vanished.

The school year of 2017-18 decided to get rid of International Club, Math Club, SADD, Debate Club, and Yoga Club. Who is to blame, the students or teachers? The answer is both.

“The big reason is apathy. Even after coaching students how to organize, promote, and host events, many times only a few students would follow through with their assigned/agreed upon job or task,” said leader of International Club Jodi Baier. In school year of 2016-17 the first meeting had 35 students attend. Once regular monthly meetings began the average attendance was eight students. The school year of 2015-16 had a committee that volunteered and organize a foreign film night but they never followed up on their action plan. It wasn’t until after the scheduled date that anyone asked, “Are we still doing that?”

Baier found that students would volunteer if they were getting service hours, but they wanted to help and not be in charge of an event (even with support). She now offers all Spanish students service opportunities, field trips, and guest speakers to enrich the class rather than doing an extra curricular club.

“I loved the math club and I really liked the idea of having high school students tutor younger ADM students in math. I just didn’t have time to sponsor the program this year due to the time commitment required of teaching a new course,” said Jean West the leader of Math Club. Unlike International Club, students did commit to their time in Math Club and tutor younger students.

The SADD Club was one of the most popular clubs. Haunted forest/hallways, drunk driving awareness, and mental health awareness were all apart of SADD. In past school years until 2014-15, Della Weems was always the leader of this club. Once she retired, Beth Basinger took over and the next year Emily Oukes took over the club. After Oukes left ADM no other staff member stepped up to take the responsibility of the club. To keep haunted hallways alive, all speech and journalism students volunteered to help out this year.

Students have raised concern on where the Debate Club has gone as well. “First of all, the group who attended regularly was a group of very like-minded people, so we were challenged to find topics that would allow genuine debate to take place. Sure, there were days when participants would be willing to pretend to fight the opposing viewpoint just for the sake of debating, but that isn’t nearly as engaging (or beneficial) as a genuine debate. Secondly, we simply ran into scheduling issues. The core group frequently had conflicts with other group meetings or obligations. After a few weeks of not having enough people to debate at all, I quit calling meetings,” said Molly Longman, leader of Debate Club.

Yoga Club was started by students here. Now seniors, Samantha Schepers and Emma Kaney had a passion for yoga and started a group that met every other Wednesday morning and learned yoga together. “It was just early mornings and not a lot of people would come. Nobody has asked for it back so we fell out of it,” said Emma.

If hearing why all of these clubs vanished upsets you, I would strongly encourage you to start a club yourself. It’s as simple as finding a group of people who are all interested and care about the same thing and finding a teacher you trust to help lead it. Keeping clubs alive here at ADM are important and the future of ADM clubs are in your hands!