USD 383: Student participation in activities drops

Marsh said he doesn’t know what caused the drop.

“We don’t have any data on that,” he said. “My theory is it’s just one of those years that you get to class as a senior and kids start making decisions about what they really want to do. It could be work, it could be childcare, it could be helping out at the house — it could be a number of different things. It surprised me as well just because of the success that we had this year in athletics at the high school. You can see how it affected the overall percentage of student athletes participating when you have a quarter of your kids — when it drops off 20 percent.”

This is not just a recent thing — Marsh said he had noticed an ongoing trend for the past seven years.

Board member Kristin Brighton suggested someone do research into the trend.

“To me — of course I like to do market research because that’s my thing — but it screams to do some market research and some surveys of our students,” she said. “I mean, seven years means this trend started before COVID. I could see this last year having to do with COVID — that these kids who are seniors this year were freshmen and sophomores when it hit.”

If students had a few disappointing years with no activities during the pandemic they might have simply lost interest in activities altogether or found new interests in other activities, Brighton suggested.

However, she said the steady drop over seven years suggests that’s not the case.

“I bet there’s a graduate student out there looking for a research project, and it would be really great to see,” Brighton said. “I mean, if there’s some unmet needs, if there’s some other issues that maybe haven’t been acknowledged that could be leading to this, I guess I would encourage us to see if we can determine it.”

She suggested surveys and student focus groups to figure out why there has been a decline in student participation in activities and athletics.