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Comment by soared | Hacker News Reader

Quote pulled for critical context - The schools want everyone involved in an extracurricular activity. This solves tons of issues - bad home life, gangs, loneliness/depression, etc.

> Finding a niche for all students to participate in an extracurricular activity is one of the DISD’s key goals. Trustees made extracurricular participation a major priority in 2017, setting a districtwide goal of 78% participation by the 2021-22 school year.

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>This solves tons of issues - bad home life

Not at all. It's just more excuse to babysit teens. Bad home life will only be fixed by raising living standards, by reducing number of hours parents need to work, providing vacation time, etc. But that would require redistributing wealth instead of raising property taxes a couple percent.

It seems like there's an awful lot of useful improvement in the space between "doing nothing" and "redistributing wealth", so I commend the DISD for not letting perfect be the enemy of good.

Babysitting does improve home life.

Hey so I'm all with you on the fact that inequity is the real problem here. But I also volunteer at an after school program at the school my wife teaches at because these kids often don't have a stable home life to go to after school. It does make a difference, and in my experience it's been very effective at helping the kids (elementary age) in this school get their homework done on time, it's reduced behavior problems, and it gives them a reason to like school. Ours is a 2 day per week program where the kids can choose to be in one of about 25 different special interest clubs (I run the computer science club) and the kids get snacks and two extra hours of time they can be safe at school instead of (often) alone at home.

Dallas and most of Texas have some of the highest property taxes in the country. Raising property taxes a couple percent would be... unreasonable.

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