Education always seems to take a hit when the government is looking to move tax dollars to a different area to balance its budget.

Inevitably, the money that the schools were supposed to be receiving gets drastically reduced, often without warning.

This leads to every school district trying to get as creative as possible at the last moment while still offering a quality education to its students.

As schools struggle to find ways to slice their budgets even greater in an effort to make do with what the government decides to give them for the year, one of the first things to be eliminated are extracurriculars.

This includes Band, Music, Drama, Technology, Art, and many other after school programs.

In addition, some of the less popular sports falls to the ax as well since anything that is not taking in money to pay for itself is removed from the after school curriculum. It used to be that this type of thing would only happen at the high school level, but as more elementary schools offer extracurriculars and with the budget getting squeezed, even the younger children are being hit with a dose of reality.

But before you give up hope on having your child learn Dance at the age of eight years old, there are alternatives outside of the school system to be aware of.

Entrepreneurship Is Thriving Entrepreneurship has never been more prevalent in history than right now.

There are millions of small businesses all around the world and many of them can offer your elementary children the experiences they are missing in school because of budget cuts.

There were 5.7 million small businesses in the United Kingdom in 2018.

With a bit of searching, it probably wouldn’t be difficult to find someone that can provide your child lessons in art, music, or anything else that your child would like to learn.

Athletic Leagues Are Everywhere If your son or daughter is missing out on playing a sport that they would really like to enroll in, luckily there are athletic leagues everywhere for children and adults of all ages.

Want to have your child start playing tennis after falling in love with the sport while watching Wimbledon? It’s simple to find the right person to teach them.

In fact, your local fitness center might be able to set your whole family up with a sport extracurricular that each of them will love.

Online Tutoring Is Not Just for School Subjects Before the internet changed the world, all of us were forced to learn only from local people that were within driving distance.

If you wanted to learn to play the piano or speak Spanish, the person living close by better be a good instructor or you are simply out of luck and will never learn it well.

However, with online tutoring being so prevalent, you can learn just about anything from experts who really know their business.

You are no longer tied down to a geographical barrier and can communicate with people all over the world that can tutor you on any topic.

In fact, maybe that extracurricular getting cut at your local school could actually turn out to be a good thing as the quality of your teacher may grow exponentially when using a different avenue to gain the desired skill.

Don’t Take No for an Answer If you truly feel it is a travesty that the local elementary does not offer the extracurriculars that all the students would love to participate in, you do not have to just accept defeat.

After all, the schools are generally operated through your tax dollars, so you should have a bit of influence on what is or isn’t available at your children’s schools.

With a little planning, you can petition the school board and try to get that exact extracurricular you want back on track.

It could take a hundred signatures from parents and students to determine if it is indeed needed.

Or maybe a proposal of a strategy on how the extracurricular will be paid for and who can run the program.

Eventually, everything comes down to money, and if you have a plan in place to ensure that it pays for itself, then the school will probably have no complaint about putting it back into the schedule.



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