Junior Brady Malone tip-toes around a group of actors dressed in black, with his arms slightly uplifted at his sides, like a bird about to take flight. In his acting lab class, he was just given the prompt to move like “light rain.” In his movements, he seems free, and this year he decided to let go of something that wasn’t bringing him as much joy as he had hoped it would: being a dual strand strander. 

“Going into freshman year, I always knew acting was my primary focus” said Malone. “Visual art, the strand I dropped, was much more in the back of my focus. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t want it to be my life, so I kept my minor. While choosing classes for this year, I realized there were other classes that I found more interesting than the next art class I had to take, so I decided to just drop it and become a sole theatre academy student.”

The pressure to get into an academy is tough, but the pressure to stay in it can be difficult as well.

“It was hard at first, like I said, I was kind of holding on because I liked the people and the program was great, but when it came to a time where my teachers were asking if I was going to take another art class or drop the strand, and I was actually being pushed to choose one or the other, it became pretty easy for me to say I wanted to drop it,” said Malone. 

Malone belongs to one of the last classes permitted to be a member of two different academy strands. This year’s freshman class was not offered the option to be in two strands.

“I think that kiddos today, they’re doing so many other things. They’re trying to work, they’re taking a ton of AP classes, you know our academy students tend to be overachievers, if you will, and so we [academy students] might think we want to do something in the beginning and then we realize we’re just too overwhelmed…I think it’s too much,” said Academy Coordinator Mrs. Amy Schuiteboer.

For some, being in the Academy is the best choice they ever made, but for others it can cause more stress than joy. It can be hard to listen to yourself when a lot of other people’s voices are in your head. Or maybe, the loudest is that nagging self-judgement. The stigma surrounding leaving an academy, in this case a strand, can be a heavy burden.

“At first, I was super nervous to tell people, especially teachers because I was afraid of judgement, like they would think I wasn’t capable of doing the course and that’s why I dropped it,” said Malone.

With all the unknowns of COVID-19 and the additional pressures of today’s society Schuiteboer believes it’s important to do what is best for you.

“We’re having kids drop the academy completely at this point part way through their program and I think our kids today have more pressure on them than people my age when we [adults] went through school,” said Schuiteboer.  “It’s hard to balance fun and all of these requirements because you guys, even though we [academy students] think that participating in our art should bring us joy and should be fun, I think that again we put so much pressure on ourselves… we may feel like we just have to be the best and sometimes our art, our craft, brings us more stress than joy and that’s where we have to find our balance and take care of ourselves. So if giving up something means we have more time to take care of ourselves I’m going to totally support that.”

While the Academy offers opportunities students can’t find in any other high school, it is a personal choice whether those opportunities are what you need to achieve success now and in the future. Going forward, students will only be permitted to be a member of one strand so they can focus their energies on one true passion and not wear themselves too thin.