What Happens When High School Extracurricular Leadership Goes To Teacher Favorites, Not Hard Workers
Last month, I found my 15-year-old third-year Rio slouched over our kitchen table at 7 p.m., a half-eaten bowl of boxed mac and cheese congealing next to their phone. They’d been waiting three days for drama club leadership announcements, and had just refreshed the group Instagram post for the fifth time in 10 minutes. “Who got head student director?” I asked, pausing mid-fold of a pile of soccer socks. “Mia Carter,” they said, not looking up. Mia is the drama teacher’s daughter. She hadn’t been to a single after-school work night all summer, and bailed on the car wash fundraiser we helped organize to go to a beach trip with her friends. Rio had spent two weekends rewriting the fall play’s script to fix plot holes the teacher didn’t have time for, and coordinated the order for new stage lights the club had fundraised for a year to buy.
Rio had been wanting this role for a year. After they came out as non-binary at the start of second year, their core friend group drifted apart, and drama was the only place they said they didn’t have to shrink themselves to fit. They’d stayed up until 1 a.m. multiple nights the month before applications were due, editing their personal statement for the role, and asked me to read it three times.
Three days after the announcement, I went in to wake them up for school on a Tuesday, and they were already awake, staring at the ceiling, their comforter pulled up to their chin. I asked if they felt sick, and they said, “What’s the point of even trying at anything anymore?” It wasn’t a loud, dramatic cry. It was quiet, flat, the kind of line that makes your stomach drop. It wasn’t an active plan, but it was the kind of hopeless questioning that every parent knows to take seriously – the kind that settles in when the thing you cared about most gets handed to someone else for no reason you can understand.
My first instinct was to minimize it. I said, “It’s just a high school club, it doesn’t define you.” Rio rolled over and faced the wall, and didn’t say a word to me all morning. That was my first lesson: don’t do that. When you’re 15, that club you poured three months into isn’t “just” anything. It’s the biggest thing in your life right then.
I talked to another mom from the school soccer team later that week, and she said the same thing had happened to her son. He made every pre-season practice, organized the team’s group chat and annual food drive, and the coach gave the captain spot to his niece, who missed half the summer workouts to train at a private club out of town. This isn’t one bad teacher, I realized. It’s a common, unspoken pattern in schools: leadership roles go to the kids adults already know, the kids connected to staff or families with deep ties to the school, not the quiet kids who show up and do the work no one else wants to do.
That night, I knocked on Rio’s door, brought in their favorite lemon iced tea from the fridge, and sat down on the end of their bed. I said, “I was wrong earlier. What happened sucks. You put more work into that play than anyone else, and it’s completely unfair that they gave the spot to someone who didn’t earn it. I’d be hurt and angry too.” That’s the first concrete thing I’d tell other parents in this spot: you don’t need a fancy speech. Just say that, if nothing else. Validation doesn’t have to be complicated. It just has to acknowledge their pain is real.
I didn’t push them to quit drama, I didn’t push them to go yell at the teacher, I didn’t even push them to appeal the decision. I just asked, “What do you want to do here?” Rio said they didn’t want to make a big scene. They still liked acting and working on technical stuff, they just wanted to actually lead something, instead of being a gofer for Mia.
We remembered the drama club had talked for years about doing a student-written one-act festival, but no one had ever gotten around to organizing it. I helped Rio write a short, one-page proposal to the teacher, asking if they could run the whole thing on their own as an independent project within the club. The teacher said yes immediately – it wasn’t a high-profile leadership role, so it didn’t threaten anything, and it was one less thing for him to plan.
I didn’t ignore that line about not seeing the point, either. That same week, I called our family counselor and scheduled a routine check-in, not an emergency session, just a space for Rio to talk through the disappointment if they wanted to. I also started doing one small, low-pressure thing every day: I leave a glass of iced tea on their desk before I leave for work, and instead of asking “how are you?” which always gets a one-word answer, I ask “what’s one annoying thing that happened today?” It gives them space to vent without feeling put on the spot, and most days, they’ll bring up the festival or something that annoyed them about Mia, and that’s enough.
Right now, Rio is three weeks out from the one-act festival. They’ve got seven student plays lined up, they’ve been holding auditions after school, and they come home most nights talking a mile a minute about blocking and props. It’s not the leadership role they applied for, and it doesn’t fix the unfairness of what happened. Some nights, they’ll still scroll past Mia’s Instagram posts talking about how she “built this fall play from the ground up” and get quiet, and I’ll just hand them another iced tea and sit with it.
This isn’t the kind of story with a neat ending where the system changes and the hardest worker gets the prize. Schools are still going to give the best roles to the kids they already favor. You can’t fix every unfair thing that happens to your kid, and you don’t have to. You can just validate their anger, help them carve out a small space to do the work they care about, and keep showing up when the hopelessness creeps in. We’re still working through it. Some days are better than others. That’s enough for now.
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