When school’s out, boredom sets in for many Island teens
Published 1:00 am Wednesday, September 17, 2008
As children, our imaginations had no limit.
A simple object could keep us occupied for hours. A cardboard box could be turned into a castle, a stick into a sword, and newspaper into a crown. As the years moved on, the castles faded back into boxes, the swords back into twigs and the crowns into paper.
When one utters the common phrase, “I am bored,” our parental units try to hold on to those magical years by offering arts and craft projects that can no longer keep us content.
As we enter middle school, sports and musical instruments become a large consumer of our minutes, along with the additional hours of homework. During the school year we don’t find ourselves repeating the phrase, “I am bored.”
Our point being that the school year is obviously hectic, where we have no time, in contrast to the summer where we have too much time with nothing to do.
Once summer starts, for teens who do not have the luxury of vacation, our lovely Island becomes more like a prison than a place to explore.
Confined to the beach and our small, humble town of Vashon, summer becomes a time of making extravagant plans rather than actually taking actions (in between camps).
A survey about summer boredom was sent out to many teens on the Island, and 12 responded.
There were three questions:
• What activities do you do during the summer?
• Do you find yourself bored on the Island in the summertime?
• If you had the perfect Island what feasible activity(s) would you like to have available to teens (high school in particular)?
Seventy-five percent of the kids surveyed answered number one saying they hang out with friends in the summer. Fifty percent said they went to camps. And fifty percent said they do active things like bike riding, swimming, running, dancing or going on trips with their families.
These activities for some can take up the whole summer, but for others are only half of the three long, hot months. Hanging out with the same people all summer can get tiring, or the annual trips to the beach may be a little too much.
Jessica Danzer, one of the 12 surveyed, said, “Yeah, it seems like there isn’t that much to do, or that it would be something you have done a lot,” on the second question.
Because our beautiful little Island lacks activities that teens frequently want to participate in, many look for things to do off-Island.
Jesse Turner, another surveyed, addressed that issue.
“Sometimes, like when I’m just at Ober Park with friends, I wish there was something we could be doing, but it’s just that none of it’s here.”
For those teens who have lack of transportation into the city, they can only think of what things they could be doing. Or they must plan a big five-hour excursion just to go bowling for an hour.
Emily Bruce, a local teen on the Island, seconded this.
“We need bowling alleys… It costs money to ride the ferry into Seattle, and then there’s the price of food, gas and shoes… If we had one (bowling alley) on the Island, we would use less gas getting there, and the Island is small, so you could go uptown or home to get food, instead of this 20-minute drive to Safeway.”
This addresses the issue to the third question, what possible activities could we have on the Island?
The most popular ideas teens had for the Island were a bowling alley, an arcade and dances (salsa and regular school dances). Another idea teens have been talking about is a “hanging out place,” a.k.a. a community-type center, with no charge.
Fundraisers could contribute to the cost of creating one of these, but to organize this would require help from both adults and teens. It would be a great step for the Vashon community to arrange something for the summer of 2009!
— Gianna Andrews and Avalon Koenig are freshmen at Vashon
High School.
