Noisy locker rooms, the stink of awkward adolescents, and sports, so many sports–these are all the attributes of an experience every Liberty High School student has had in the form of Freshman PE.
However, in the next school year, 2024-2025, incoming freshmen will get the delight of choosing what they want their school mandated exercise to be, with the removal of Freshman PE. Instead, students will pick specific PE classes just as older students already do.
“Forcing every freshman to take a class that’s focused around sports isn’t beneficial to every student because some of them don’t enjoy sports. That’s not the type of physical activity that they like to do,” said PE teacher Kelsey Foote.
One of the things that many students dislike about Freshman PE is that it’s nearly identical to Team Sports, and each student is required to do the class, regardless of if they even like sports. Nobody, student or staff, is able to reason about the necessity of Freshman PE for this reason.
“The only way to instill lifelong fitness in all students is to help expose them to other types of fitness that they could do throughout their lives,” said Foote.
The best way to do this is to give them the freedom to explore forms of exercise they aren’t as used to. Team-based sports are the main form of exercise introduced to teens during middle school, and removing Freshman PE makes way for this freedom.
“One of the emphases of our current school boards is that they want to increase student choice. We want to give kids more choices and more options to choose the courses they want to take,” said Liberty’s principal Andrew Brownson.
To provide more choice to students, a new PE course will be offered next: Hiking. This will work to give Liberty freshmen more ways to explore fitness at Liberty. The removal of Freshman PE and introduction of Hiking might even lead to more opportunity for future unique additions to the PE classes offered at Liberty. Currently Hiking will be joining Team Sports, Dance Aerobics and Yoga, Weight Training, Lifetime and Community Sports, and ROTC as PE courses.
“My hope is always to try to be able to expand what we offer,” said Brownson.
While Liberty’s athletics staff is hopeful about the removal of Freshman PE, there are still possible obstacles that this change may create.
“Freshmen could be doing team sports with upperclassmen that are older than them, so there could be a variety of sizes in athletic ability, which may cause some issues in team sports occasionally,” said Foote.
This dynamic may benefit students instead of being a problem. Students need to be challenged, and working with upperclassmen offers quite a challenge.
“I think it’s good for kids to be mixed amongst different grade levels instead of just all necessarily the same grade,” said Brownson.
PE courses aren’t just meant to teach teens good physical fitness, they teach teamwork, and this removal will hopefully improve teamwork between grades, improving overall spirit between students at Liberty.
While the majority of current Liberty students have already lived through Freshman PE and don’t benefit as much from this development, students can still cheer for the upcoming freshmen that will be getting the choice that older students didn’t have.
