The high school I attended back in the Late Bronze Age had classes in Theater/Drama. These classes also covered lighting, sound, etc. and you were required to do both in the Advanced classes. A/V was more volunteer than club. I was part of a crew, for example, that set up and ran the speaker system for the cheerleaders at football games. I also spent more than a little time running lights in the larger of our auditoriums.
The high school I’ve taught at for the last 30+ years has no auditorium, but still offers beginning and advanced drama classes (no tech.) with at least one play and one musical a year. We also have several video production classes that produced daily announcement newscasts and the like.
I went to an all-boys private school in Canada; my impression from my school and local public schools - there was a club if enough people were interested and there was a teacher interested in looking after it. Back in the good old days, and I imagine today, a group of kids hanging around the classrooms after hours needed adult supervision. Sports seemed to be the major attraction. I was in the chess club, since there were enough nerds to make it work. There was a “theatre arts” class, and music was also taught, but no strong interest outside class - except the tradition to put on two plays a year - a drama in the late fall and a musical in the spring. All organized by a few teachers and outside help - but not a club. I think in the 50’s they had the whole school letter athletic sweater/jacket thing like American high schools, but by the mid to late 60’s that seems to have petered out. Without girls around to impress, nobody seemed to give a hoot.
We had a drama club, but most of the people were also taking whatever the drama/performing arts electives were- basically stuff like acting, set design, direction, etc… Only a handful of people outside of that bunch were involved, and mostly along the lines of finding some game jock to play a big tall goon or something like that.
AV club… not really, although I guess we had something similar. The school had its own closed-circuit TV network, and the guys who ran the production end all took electives in TV production or something like that. They learned how to direct, how to run the cameras, how to edit, do green-screen, etc… They put on a morning newscast every morning with a couple of students (chosen through auditions) as the news presenters, as well as some other all-hands broadcasts through the year.
In addition to the Thespian Society, there was an orchestra, marching band, concert band, jazz band, and a handful of choirs. I can’t recall for sure whether there was a glee club, but I think there was.
Back then, glee club was something only its members paid attention to. The TV show gave it a prominence that it never had in high school culture before then.
Once a year, the thespians, orchestra, and concert band would merge together to put on a Broadway-style musical. I remember being in the pit for “How to Succeed in Business …”
One thing to realize is that drama and AV clubs are probably over-represented in Hollywood because the kids who were in drama and AV clubs in high school are the people writing and producing movies and TV shows today.
That said, my school had a drama club that put on one musical per year. It was directed by the school’s band and choral director. I understand he was paid a pittance in overtime to run it and he spent a ton of off-duty time raising funds for it.
We didn’t have an AV club but we had classes in video production, filming, editing, etc. The kids in those classes programmed one of the local cable access channels and provided it with a bunch of original content when they weren’t running old Dr. Who episodes, city council meetings, and school committee meetings. I don’t remember who set up the TVs and film projectors in classes. It might have been students from the AV classes but I’m not sure.
My kids went to a votech high school. They did not have a drama club, choir, band, or even classes. Nothing artistic whatsoever. However, other than that, it is a great school.
Way back in the paleolithic, the school (grades 1-12) had about 20 kids in highschool. So no real clubs. All the fit guys were on all the sports teams and the one not-so-fit guy was the team manager. No clubs in-school for the girls and a few teams like tennis. A lot belonged to 4H and such outside of school. Due to the small size it was closed and we got out of town.
Moving forward to the neolithic, in middle school some of the boys (oh well) got to be AV* helpers. Got taught how to run the projectors and such. Got a card. Not a club.
I could probably setup a Bell&Howell projector still.
The HS didn’t even have that. But all the kids from the middle school AV group automatically became the AV* people for high school. And actual “V” started showing up a bit. Not an official club.
There was a drama club.
For my kids, there was a “tech” club and a “drama” club. Due to the makeup of these clubs they formed an alliance to balance things out. So one kid appeared in the background of a couple plays, etc. (And later it was thru the drama group met the guy of Puddles Pity Party fame, but that’s another story.)
I do know that the other kid has an AV tech card since I ran across it a while back. The AV is strong in this one.
Note that the more conservative church-based schools might not allow drama and such in their schools.
The “V” didn’t exist in schools then. It as all “F”. I don’t recall what the actual term was.
I don’t know about now, but in the 1980’s, in my New Jersey high school, there was neither club. If a teacher volunteered to put on a play or musical, anyone could audition or work backstage, etc. If nobody volunteered, it didn’t happen. As far as an AV club, some kids (all boys, what a surprise) were taught what to do and that was that.
Back in the paleolithic age of my all boys (not any more) public HS, I don’t think there was any AV at all. What we did have was an honest-to-god planetarium. It wasn’t large; a classroom sized room in the basement and there was a club to learn to use it. There was some drama, a play every year, so there may have been a drama club.
I went to a small (3A) school in Texas in the late 90’s, and we had a chapter of the Thespian society for the drama kids like me. Aside from that and Theater class, there was also the UIL One-Act Play contest in the spring. So we spent quite a bit of time together.
My school (in Maryland in the 90’s, also ~2000 students) also had a full TV studio, where we made student-produced programs that aired on the public access channel. It was part of one of two magnet programs at the school, the Communication Arts Program (CAP), and the other was a more traditional STEM magnet program. The TV studio was fully staffed by students, and only supervised by school faculty; I was one of the staff videographers and spent a lot of time hanging out in the studio during 11th and 12th grade. In fact, what little time I spent on campus in 12th grade was mostly in there.
Curiously, the school also had an A/V Club that was completely independent of the CAP. It was comprised of only about 3 students, IIRC.
I went to a rural high school in Louisiana and our tiny class didn’t even warrant air conditioning despite the sweltering heat. The pages of our books were crinkled and stuck together by sweat and the school burned to the ground my senior year. You better bet your ass that we didn’t have any kinds of fancy clubs of that sort.
Instead, we had FFA (Future Farmers of America), 4-H, MADD (Mothers against Drunk Driving) and DAMM (Drunks against Mad Mothers). I may have dismembered that last one but that was the general idea.
In my ~1000-student high school in the early 60s in suburban California, we had a Drama Club and a Photography Club—but not A/V per se.
In addition, there was Speech and Debate, Chess, Amateur Radio, Rifle (photo in the yearbook of them sitting in the Quad with their rifles), plus German, French, Spanish, and Latin. Also Choir, Orchestra, Concert/Marching Band, and Jazz Band.
There wasn’t a drama club per se, but there was always a senior play each year and sometimes other productions.
No AV, but there wasn’t much AV back then. Filmstrips were the go to and didn’t require much experience to run. There were TVs for PBS educational programming, but they usually just collected dust.
Back in the mid-late '80’s in Maryland my high school had a drama club and AV club. Within the drama club there was a subset of ‘Thespians’ which you got into by earning ‘points’ by working on shows in various capacities: acting/stage crew/lighting/construction/costume slut/stage manager/assistant stage manager/painting/tickets/fundraising (selling chocolate bars). The teacher who oversaw/sponsored Drama Club was the arbiter of how many points you got. You needed 10 to become a thespian, and it was NOT easy.
Well for some people it wasn’t easy.
But I wasn’t one of those people.
AV Club was sponsored by a guy who worked in the library, he was actually pretty cool, but i was never in it. Our school had a ‘radio station’ whose broadcast range literally didn’t extend to the front door of the school