In Canyon Vista, there is a class all sixth and seventh graders are required to take. That class is Physical Education or PE for short. All students are required to take PE in sixth grade, and a PE class such as athletics, sports and fitness, or dance. But there is another option. That option is off-campus PE.

Off-campus PE allows you to not do PE in school. If you get 15 hours of sports time outside of school in a school week, you can apply for off-campus PE at the start of the year. You then can go home after seventh period, and not take a PE class in school. This is great for someone with an outside of school sport. The problem with off-campus PE though, is that the requirements to be eligible is way too hard.

The first requirement that should be changed is that the time spent on the sport must be during a school week. Students don’t have enough time during the school week to do their sport three hours a day. With homework, and the fact that school ends at 3:35 p.m., students have almost no time to be able to do their sport for three hours a day. Most students do their sports on the weekends. During the school week, students devote about 1 – 2 hours a day on their sport. On weekends though, they may devote almost 4 – 5 hours a day on their sport. This would allow students to really catch up on their hours for off-campus, and would also be a lot more of a fair judgment as to how much the students are really doing outside of school.

The other requirement that is not fair is the fact that it must be 15 hours. In school, we are doing less than 5 hours of PE a week. To be eligible for off-campus PE, students must do more than 3 times that amount. This is not fair. Students are putting a lot of effort into their sport even if they are doing 10 – 11 hours a week. They are still doing over 2 times the amount of PE that is done in school. It is not fair at all that the school requires you to do only 5 hours of PE in school to get a PE credit, but requires you to do over 3 times that amount.

Off-campus PE is a great thing for students doing an out of school sport, but the requirements need to be changed.