The Death of Creativity [ArticleImageHyperLink] Thursday, June 07, 2012 By Robert Stephens Advertising Port Angeles High School no longer cares about you as a person. You are a statistic, a unit added in a mass equation that comes down to one thing: graduation. A school is judged by graduation rate and regardless of what official reports obviously skewed say, our school has a significant number of failures and dropouts. But this article is not to describe the shortcomings of the administration, but rather to explain how this is soiling the creativity of students everywhere. When I was a middle schooler, I got to listen to my sister explaining her Senior Culminating Project and it sounded amazing! Finally, an expansive undertaking involving the whole of your high school expertise and YOU got decide what it was! Instantly my mind swirled with ideas, and all through freshman and sophomore year I worked towards presenting a thoughtful eloquent project that would show off my skills as a scholar and orator. BUT all that is useless now as everyone now does the same thing known as the “social responsibilities project”. My first problem with the SRP, (that’s not what it is called but JCP sounds capitalist and continuing to call it the SCP would be insulting,) is that it takes place junior year. While it makes sense to do the SRP junior year, as it is nothing more than a graduation requirement, whereas the senior culminating project CULMINATED something. Several studies have shown that junior year is the hardest with AP exams, SATs and the stress of finding a college (something you shouldn’t wait until senior year to do.) Why add more stress on the backs of students who are already trying their hardest when seniors can just as easily perform the same task and should be able to do it easier considering they’ve been at school longer?! The answer is simple; the school killed the SCP to look better. “Wow Mr. Stephens, that is a strong accusation, what evidence do you have to back it up?” Think of it this way: The SCP was a challenge, a challenge that a few seniors could not handle and thus not graduate. Since a school is rated poorly and looked down upon if it continually flunks out more students than it graduates, the SCP was costing the school its green idol: money. How to solve this problem? Merely make the graduation requirement so simple, so generic that anyone should (should, not can) be able to finish it and graduate. This will make the school look good and hopefully earn more funding. Now that everyone has the SAME project, the teacher doesn’t need to invest time with each individual student like someone who cares about young adults might, now they need only teach the whole class one thing and sit back and if the students fail, who is there to blame? This is where the creativity, the love and care put into the SCP died, where kids who require help just get a free pass because they get to do a sub-standard assignment. It’s my opinion that a school’s purpose is to narrow your options down from infinite to a specific goal or career. As a child, your parents tell you can be a lawyer or a doctor, and school acts as a testing ground where you can see what you want to do in life because it is your decision! True learning comes from experience, and there was no greater experience in decision making than the SCP. By giving the same infinite amount of options for your senior culminating project, the school simulated whether or not you could handle adult life, if you were ready for the new world if you passed. One could argue that the social responsibilities project teaches kids the importance of community service, except that there is a flaw in that argument: we already had a mandatory community service requirement with the SCP! Why makes the entire requirement just community service when you accomplished the same thing before, but with an extra project that taught decision making and focused your knowledge into useable facts! The school once gave students a REAL learning experience, but now to maximize how many children the school spits out into the world, we as students must settle for a cookie-cutter project. This is my final opinion piece for the year and I personally hope that someday, someone will realize that students are intelligent people, capable of ideas that are every bit as equal in merit as the excellent teaching staff of PAHS. I respect what the school is trying to do with the social responsibilities project, but as I have stated, there has to be a better way and there was! Although bringing back the SCP is unlikely, I would like to ask the hierarchy of the school administration to look at the policies and guidelines of the social responsibilities project. The goal of this educational review is the bettering of students as members of society and as intelligent scholars, to provide a better future for both themselves and their country.

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