Open Letter to the Wayland High School Fine Arts Department and Administration

Dear Respected Educators,

We, the undersigned, would like to express our concerns regarding the unfairness of the school’s longstanding and inflexible policy that applies to students who wish to participate in any of the student-run a cappella clubs.

The problem: 

As it stands, any such student is required to concurrently also take a fine arts class for each and every semester that the student is involved in the a cappella club, no matter how many such classes they’ve already taken, and no matter whether doing so limits the student’s ability to access other elective course opportunities that they would very much like to explore. While we recognize the importance of formal fine-arts training, and we value the teacher-led learning gained in structured classes, it is also true that WHS students are allotted only a limited number of elective slots for self-exploration and discovery of new areas of academic interest, both in fine arts and beyond, and that such an important opportunity should not be overly constrained by an onerous policy that requires a subset of WHS students to use up to fully half of their limited high school elective slots solely on fine arts classes if they want to be involved in the after-school a cappella clubs. We note that no other extracurricular club is held to a similar curricular requirement. Whatever incremental value is added by requiring more and more fine-arts courses, at some point the advantage can be outweighed by the missed opportunities in not being able to follow electives in other non-fine-arts interests due to overly-booked schedules.

The fine arts a cappella policy is not only too burdensome, it is also not appropriate for all students, and it needlessly restricts opportunities to explore class interests in, for example, business, journalism, science, math, or history, among others—all of which are also valuable areas for students to explore during their high school years. School policies should encourage students to try a wide variety of academic directions, but this policy sometimes has the opposite effect—forcing academically curious students into the unnecessary choice between not pursuing an elective interest outside of fine-arts because they must take yet another fine arts class and there is no room for more, or having to drop out of the extracurricular a cappella club that they love.

We feel that such a false choice is not only a shame, it is also avoidable.

Our request:

We ask that the fine arts department and Wayland High School build in some reasonable level of flexibility into the requirement so that the elective choices of a cappella participants aren’t so drastically limited. There are many possible options for doing so. Some examples:

• There could be two different participation tracks for a cappella club participants—a ‘credit’ track where the student chooses to participate and follow the current requirements for some level of course credit, and a separate ‘audit’ track where the student chooses to participates in the club without the curricular requirement or academic credit.
• There could be an alternate option for students who wish to take non-fine-arts electives, where the a cappella club participant is required to write an end-of-the-year experience paper, or fulfill some other reasonable fine-arts-project requirement not using an elective slot.
• Where a four-year a cappella club participant is currently required to take eight semesters of fine-arts courses (half of all their elective slots), this number could be reduced to something lower—three semesters, for example. In addition, such courses could be taken non-concurrently, meaning, for example, that a student who begins a cappella participation as a sophomore but who took a fine-arts class both semesters of freshman year, could apply those two freshman semesters toward the fine-arts requirement.
• There are many other possibilities for increasing flexibility into the policy and thus widening academic opportunities for students.

We believe that what we are asking for is not unreasonable. We believe, in fact, that a more flexible fine-arts policy is in the best interests of Wayland High School students who not only take pride in WHS’s extracurricular, student-run a cappella clubs, but also wish to take maximum advantage of the school’s many varied elective options for academic self-discovery while participating in those clubs.

With respect, we thank you for your consideration.