As students get older, reading often gets put on the backburner, however the benefits of reading for leisure transcend age.

Many students remember a greater weight being placed on reading for pleasure in elementary school than high school.

With the workload from classes, most students either can’t find the time to read, or simply do not see the relevance.

“I think they’ve definitely reduced the stress on how much we should be reading because everything we are reading today in class is something that we have to read,” junior Lauren Head said. “It’s almost like a forced reading instead of reading for enjoyment which is how I believe that it should be. I think that reading in class and expanding our knowledge for what we learn in class is great but I think that allowing us more time in class or more time outside of class to read what we enjoy would really incentivize just reading as a whole and allow us to enjoy reading a little bit more.”

However, an article by oneworldliteracyfoundation.org calls on the benefits of reading as being “a vital skill in being able to function in today’s society” as well as “helping to expand the mind and develop imagination” and that “a person who knows how to read can educate themselves in any area of life (that) they see fit”.

AP Lang teacher Swapna Gardner enjoys reading and sees a direct benefit in her writing due to it.

“I became an English teacher because I love reading so much,” Gardner said. “I love reading because I use it more as an escape. I just love to read fiction and just go into a completely different world.”

So if reading holds a heavy weight on the growth and development of people of all ages, why is it seemingly disappearing from the school system?

Most teachers and students chalk it up to a lack of time or the stress of impending grades.

Head, enjoys and greatly values reading and aims to help nurture it in her club, the student committee for literary arts.

“Each week we learn about authors and we learn about a certain element of writing that will hopefully help us just create our own writing styles and increase our abilities as writers, as readers, and almost transports you to a new kind of place where you can experience things that you might not be able to experience here in a school environment,” Head said. “It just gives you a nice outlet to be able to just experience something that’s a little bit more creative a little more out of this world then the mundane society we live in today.”

Some teachers on campus are aiming to change that bit by bit, such as Gardner who attempts to re-incorporate reading into the curriculum. Despite an AP Lang course not putting a heavy weight on independent reading, Garder dedicates the first 10 minutes of class to discuss different books that have sparked her interest.

“That was something I started last year, when I was teaching,” Gardner said. “It was actually a english teacher conference that inspired me to do it. The person that was leading the conference told us that it is important to think of reading as a skill that needs to be developed over time and we need to practice it just as a skill.”

School librarian Chelsea Hamilton also agrees that reading should still play a major part in learning.

“One of the main benefits of reading is the more that you read, the better that you write,” Hamilton said. “It directly correlates with your classes, and anything that you are doing, and it also helps process anything that you see in your speaking, so it’s all of your reading, speaking, writing, is tied together. It also helps with your imagination and everything that you’re working on. I think reading should definitely be enforced, from you know pre-k all the way through college, because it helps you with your imagination.”