Each day, students are required to come to school and sit from 7:30am to 2:15pm, with little movement. Unless you have voluntarily taken some sort of fitness class, you probably don’t do much moving unless it’s walking from one class to the next. Some students who don’t have after school activities, are then driven home to sit down for another few hours to complete homework. In school, we are only required to take one semester of a class which is 9 weeks of health education (more sitting) and 9 weeks of actual physical activities.

So why isn’t student health a large concern in high school? In elementary and middle school, gym class was happening on an every other day basis, and fruits and vegetables were thrown at kids every lunch (both literally and figuratively), and recess was there for kids to go outside and run around.

A large reason student health may not be as big of a concern is because we are being taught to make our own decisions and figure out what is best for us with minimal adult input. So, should high school be preparing us for the “real world”, where we have to make the decision to exercise on our own,or should they be enforcing fitness, so that we may possibly carry on with it after we graduate?

A student at Tuscarora shared their opinion on the topic, “I believe we should be required have gym class every year in high school because we are not the healthiest country, and we are constantly struggling with obesity problems in the U.S. We should teach students how to be healthy, so when they are living on their own they can use some of the methods they learned in high school, and they won’t have to jog their memory all the way back to freshman year gym class.

“I think the problem with requiring four years of phys ed is that kids are already forced to often eliminate classes they are interested in taking, such as music and art, in order to take all the core subjects they have to along with the newest push for college credits and AP classes; adding mandatory phys ed will only serve to further diminish the role of arts and music in our schools along with jeopardizing other core subject elective offerings” a teacher here at Tuscarora stated. If students are not interested in gym, why require them to take that but not require them to take something that can show them that they could be interested in other things along with personal health?

It will probably remain the same with one semester of a required fitness class combined with health. Student’s should be able to make their own decisions without a fitness class in high school to assist them, but if it was required, would it better motivate students?