[IKE]

I like Tom's line of thinking, with regards to personal and parental responsibility, but I am ok with oversight as well.

I tend to side though with the school on this one. For instance the A/Bs you could have had are now D's (which can be improved to a B/Cs, but you will not get the A/Bs. Once the grades have slipped, and the student is kicked off the team (academic probation), it seems like a double whammy where a soft limit could have been in place. (Better learn to write a funny song to get into MIT.)

Maybe a good compromise would be to establish hours in a reasonable manner with a discussion. Instead of a hard limit, have several soft limits. If you exceed X hours a week, a call will go to your parents to verify that they are engaged in what is going on. If you excede Y hours in a month, an email will be sent to your teachers asking about your performance.

I like math so let's look at it from some numbers:

7x24=168 hrs/week. Assume students are in school 8am-3pm= 7hrsx5=35hrs. Assume 1hr for prep (shower and travel)=5-15 (10 avg.), Assume 7 hrs of sleep average=49
168-35-10-49 = 74 hours of available time. Throw in 1 hour of homework each night and you are down to 69 total hours per week for life outside of school and sleeping. So far we have not included the 3 T's of being a Teenager (TV, Tech (games or texting), and Talking on the phone).

We will call this 69 hours "life" as it is the timeframe where most students would say having a "life" happens.

For a 6 week period:
60 = 10/week which is typically a part time job like bagging groceries or a paper route. You are not around enough to understand how to run the store, but enough to do a meaningful job well. 10/69=14% of "life"
90 = 15/week Still part-time. Not a critical roll, but similar to game and practice schedule for many sports. This is roughly our "minimum" involvement on 33. 15/69=22% of "life"
120 = 20/week As Tom showed, this is a pretty involved student that could/should be able to be quite involved. This could be 4x3hour meetings plus 8 hours on Saturday. This seems like a pretty good goal for someone engaged. 20/69=29% of "life"
150 = 25/week This could be 4x4hour meetings plus 9 hours on Saturday. This is more inline with our "mentor" schedule. We will likely end up putting in more time, but this is typically what we have scheduled. 25/69=36% of "life"
180 = 30/week 30/69=43% of "life"
210 = 35/week many 40/week employees with paid breaks/lunch end up doing about this number of hours as a "Full-time employee". 35/69=51% of "life" (yes over 1/2 of your "life" is FRC for this timeframe)
240 = 40/week "Full-time" employee 40/69=58% of "life"
300 = 50/week average. Likely comes from a 40/week schedule and lots of for a few of the weeks. 50/69=72% of "life"
360 = 60/week 60/69=87% of "life" Your family and friends forget who you are.

210 seems like a reasonable "soft limit" for people to get concerned and start calling teachers/parents. Probably shouldn't be a hard limit, but definitely something to take note of.