Over the past few years, students at Boston Latin School have suspected a decline in club activity.
While discussing their club activity, many club leaders have voiced concerns over funding issues, especially for clubs that operate around competitions. Clubs like BLS Mock Trial and BLS Speech and Debate have had to get creative with their funding management.
BLS Mock Trial receives approximately seven thousand dollars to cover their competition fees, hotels and transportation. Competition fees alone cost about 100 dollars per person, totaling over two thousand dollars including hotel costs and Amtrak tickets. With three competitions per year, the team has had to cut some of their events outside of competing, such as a seminar at Harvard. To combat this, Mock Trial does multiple bake sales throughout the year, though profit from these seems to have fallen off as well. Their profits have nearly halved from prior bake sales.
Likewise, BLS Asian Students in Action (A.S.I.A) is starting to see a potential pattern of sales trouble. A.S.I.A primarily relies on ticket sales for their school-wide events, such as Asian Night. Terance Wang (I), resource manager of A.S.I.A, notes, “I’ve been an officer since 2023, and, personally, I would say that it was really easy, like way easier, to sell tickets back then.”
BLS Speech and Debate faces some financial obstacles as well. Since the debate team travels a lot for tournaments, they have had to cut down on the number of tournaments that they go to each year in order to continue covering the entry fee for each student. In order to maintain adequate funding, the team has turned to the concessions they sell at each tournament, as well as parents to provide rides and items to sell.
When asked about a possible solution, BLS Speech and Debate faculty advisor Mr. Yilmaz Yoruk proposes “an opportunity for clubs to get together again, convention style like [the Extracurricular Fair], and sell some products that they make or food — something social.”
Other than waning funding support, some club leaders have noticed that the amount of students that join their clubs have begun to dwindle. BLS Mock Trial saw about 30 sign-ups compared to their numbers from previous years leaning closer to 60. Because of their tryout process, however, their retention rate is consistent, unlike BLS Speech and Debate. Compared to their similar numbers of 60 sign-ups in prior years, the debate team is seeing about 30 to 40 sign-ups, which diminishes to about 15 students, mainly made up of those who go to the tournaments, by the end of the year.
When asked about a possible reason for the lower sign-up rate, Mock Trial co-captain Kate O’Riordan (I) comments, “I think that people aren’t just signing up for a million clubs for the sake of it anymore. I think they’re actually picking the ones that they like and are go[ing] to do.”
Despite these recent problems, both Mr. Yoruk and O’Riordan contend that it is still too early in the year to tell if there is any pattern that could indicate an actual decline in club activity at BLS.
