The PHS Club Fair in late September was quite a spectacle, with a bustling, friendly atmosphere and impressive turnout. Students moved from stand to stand, eagerly typing their email into sign-up sheets and taking a piece or two of candy on their way out, building a mounting stash of treats. One of the most exciting aspects of the high school experience is the opportunity to join clubs — and not just for the snacks. PHS has a robust club culture, boasting over 140 registered clubs. The vast array of organizations — from Debate Club to the Spork to Chess Club — ensures that each student can find a space and community that aligns with their unique passions. For the most part, students at PHS enjoy the process; clubs offer a tangible space for students to bond over shared interests and form lasting friendships throughout their four years.

However, not all clubs are created equal. The most beneficial clubs for students are those that hold regular, organized meetings, have active participation, and clear goals. Such clubs can allow students to gain valuable skills, experience, and confidence. But the tale of clubs that meet once or twice before disappearing into inactivity is all too familiar. PHS is plentiful in clubs that lack steadfast leadership to look up to, making it difficult for students to create a lasting impact. Thus, the benefits of joining a club are limited to reliable clubs that meet recurrently, and PHS’s club system is not ensuring this as such.

The current club system is surprisingly rudimentary considering the large sum of student organizations we have. For a student looking to start a club, the process looks like this: leaders submit a club application with the endorsement of an advisor, and if the proposal is accepted, the responsibility is left completely up to students to promote their club, attract students, design club plans, retain members, and meet consistently.

The unfortunate truth is that many clubs are not formed out of true passion or genuine interest — as a result, rather than engaging with the established clubs, students start near-duplicate clubs that end up serving little purpose other than fodder in their college applications. Worse, nearly all proposed clubs pass the application process seamlessly, including clubs that are simply performative.

The low bar set to create a club at PHS ultimately causes deteriorating quality. Most clubs fall short of providing the experience they promise to deliver to prospective members at the club fair. Many underclassmen complain about unproductive club meetings, where members do little more than eat their lunch and talk to friends. This may seem harmless on the surface, but the existence of organizations managed halfheartedly distorts the purpose of our club culture as a whole.

As the existence of these dispassionate clubs become normalized, students lose trust in PHS clubs overall, even the truly productive ones led by passionate students. At best, attendance dwindles over time as people become reluctant to waste their valuable free time; at worst, students will emulate this behavior in their own organizations, and this complacent phenomenon will become commonplace.

Some sort of check-in system needs to be in place to stop this from occurring. First, a reform to the application process itself is necessary. Clubs that are possible duplicates should face much higher scrutiny before receiving approval, and be extremely apparent in their distinctions. A more detailed description of activities and curricula should be provided by club leaders, rather than a vague mission statement. Advisors should ensure that the club is being actively managed to keep students accountable.

Numerous aspects of the club system make it difficult for clubs to remain reliable for both members and leaders. Most well-established, reliable clubs have recurring meeting rooms that are claimed — but only unofficially.

It is a cumbersome task for new club leaders to find available rooms and times to occupy, making meetings hard to organize. Rooms may be locked, occupied, under maintenance, or denied usage by a teacher, and there would be no efficient way to tell ahead of time. Lacking a reliable meeting location makes it challenging to plan productive events; members may be deterred from the complication or miss meetings out of confusion, lowering attendance and creating new obstacles to productivity. To make matters worse, keeping track of the clubs you’ve signed up for is a pain. Getting on a club’s email list after the club fair is often near impossible if you don’t already have friends connected to them, making it even harder to find out which room meetings are.

Of course, it could be argued that these issues can all be more or less rectified with increased efforts of club leaders. Leaders could facilitate seamless communication with their members, have their contact information constantly be available to interested students, and sort out logistical obstacles on their own. After all, by taking on the role of a club leader, a student is encouraged to devote themselves to the community they manage. Unfortunately, the idea that students are wholly responsible for maintaining a club simply is unrealistic; at the end of the day, we are all busy high school students trying to get by. Between the overwhelming load of assessments and projects, essays and presentations, it is inevitable that mishaps and miscommunications will occur.

There is a straightforward solution to these rampant problems — establishing a club room log available to all students. Faculty would first indicate which rooms are available at what times, and then club leaders can fill in which slots they would like to occupy in advance. This not only makes room claims a much more standardized process, but also addresses accessibility problems. Students will finally have a log they can refer to if they would like to join a club after the club fair, or simply to check when their club is meeting in case communication was missed.

As we head into the 2024–2025 school year with a record-breaking number of new clubs, it is important to think about a set of checks and balances to hold students accountable. A more consolidated, organized, club system would support PHS’s ambitious students and preserve the passion and community that clubs promise us.