I hope that works better for other schools than it did for mine.

Most of the students that went to the school that I went to opted for a "spare" class instead of taking photography, business, arts, programming, or any of the other creative courses. The tools were there in my case, but most people just ignored them in favour of being able to leave school early, or in favour of taking an extra long lunch. They ignored the after school stuff too, because they wanted to spend time with their friends somewhere else.

We had a pretty good photography course too, they covered almost everything and there was even an option to take it for multiple years/grades if you wanted to learn even more about it. The kids at my school who usually did things like Tik Tok and Vine in the bathroom didn't seem to really care for those courses. Social media was just fun for them, they never intended on making anything of it.

There has to be some solution that we aren't seeing yet. There has to be some common ground between "let the kids do whatever they want, regardless of their education" and "dystopian hell".

It would also help if kid's parents were more involved overall, although you could also argue that a huge part of the cause is the insane hours that many of the parents have to spend working to let the family survive.

This all sucks. I hope someone is able to make your idea work, truly. We need a solution, asap.