
The first year of the North Star High School “Dungeons & Dragons” club has come to a close.
The club met twice per week – once for junior students and another for senior aged students – with club members gathering at lunch breaks and after school to enjoy the game. Teacher Jake Simpkins said it was a way for students to come together and play the game.
“The D&D club was started at North Star as a way to play in a safe and inclusive environment,” he said. “It is a game where you can be a wizard, a warrior, a barbarian, a cleric or a healer. There’s different classifications that you can be.”
Some students aren’t athletic or don’t want to be in such groups as student parliament and the Dungeons and Dragons club is an outlet for them to get involved and be themselves. He said they have fun and people could come in and out of it, depending if they had other things they were involved in during points of the school year.
Benefits of the club include having to make decisions and the consequences of those decisions.
“You can make good choices or you can make evil choices (during the game),” he said.
There are other benefits the students gained.
“The main thing we try to show is they have to work as a team,” said Simpkins. “They communicate verbally and physically. They have to work together to get through certain situations. Above all, they have to work together to solve problems.”
Ideally, a game of D&D has four to five people but Simpkins said they have had more students than anticipated in some of them. The club grew to where Grade 9 and 10 students played Monday and Grade 11 and 12 students played Friday. There were 18 students in the club in total.
Simpkins added he heard positive reviews from parents for creating a social environment for their children by starting the club.
“That’s nice to hear,” he said.
While Simpkins will be teaching at another school in the fall, he added other North Star teachers have shown interest in taking the Dungeons and Dragons team over in September.
First year of “Dungeons & Dragons” club wrapping up at North Star High School
By Ron Giofu
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