Enrollment and Moving Over the Summer

Even though class is not in session, there is a

lot happening at schools over the summer. One of those activities is the

enrollment of new students. When possible, families often make their moves

during the summer months. This is logical for obvious reasons and is something

I recommend for reasons I’ll explain below. Of course, moving schools

inevitably comes with some hardships that you should be prepared for.

         The social piece is one that needs consideration.

I don’t encounter many students who are excited to leave their old friends

behind and start at a new school. Then again, there are cases in which social

reasons are a motivating factor behind a move. Especially, if the student is

moving to a school-based on a digital platform. Regardless, encourage your

student to look at their move as an opportunity. It’s an opportunity to start

with a clean slate and rebuild who they want to be. There is tremendous

potential in that and it’s not an opportunity everyone has. 

         The academics are also crucial here. Summer really

is the best time to move. Schools operate in a very cyclical way and starting

at the beginning of a new school year allows a student to start at the

beginning of that cycle. I know moves are often caused by a change in a

parent’s employment and I have worked with many families where one parent gets

a new job in the middle of the school year and moves on to the new place while

the other parent stays behind with the kids and lets them finish the school

year at their old school. This isn’t always feasible but if it is, it’s worth

considering. 

         Anytime you change schools, especially when you

move across state lines, there are likely to be speed bumps. What I mean is

that policies and requirements can vary. So, a student might be required to

take four sciences at their new school whereas their old school only required

three. Or freshman take US government at the new school but it’s usually a

senior-level course at the out school. Little hiccups like these generally are

nothing major but they are issues that have to be rectified. It’s usually the

job of a counselor, enrollment officer, or administrator to make a plan for

this, but families should understand these possibilities.

         Lastly, if college is in the plan, families need

to familiarize themselves with state colleges and scholarships right away.

These institutions may not make concessions for students who move late in high

school so there might be some catching up to do. If you have a pre-paid plan in

your previous state, you’ll need to investigate what happens in the case of a

move right away. 

         One last point here is that communication is

always key. Reach out to the school you’ll be moving to and your current school

to make sure everything is in place and there are no surprises. Doing this can

save you a lot of headaches and put you in the best position to make the

transfer from one school to the next seamless.

College Admission Rescission

Over the course of senior year, high school students apply to college, and hopefully, are accepted. As colleges evaluate those students, they are using data from the students’ high school career thus far. The academic portion of this is usually cut off at the end of junior year. However, high school seniors are still going to school and they are still being, you know, teenagers. There’s a lot that can still happen, good or bad, in that senior year and when it comes to the bad, it’s always important to remember that from a technical standpoint, the offer of acceptance to a college or university is provisional.


This brings us to the concept of rescission. That is when a college offers a student acceptance and then comes back later and rescinds that acceptance. Rescission often comes over the summer or sometimes even into the fall semester, but it is not a pleasant experience. Imagine telling everyone at your graduation party that you’ll be headed off to State U. in the fall, you start buying things for your dorm coordinated with your school’s colors, then you get a letter in the mail that says, “on second thought, you’re no longer welcome here.”


Before your panic, I should say that letters of rescission from colleges are relatively rare. If you’ve been a straight A student your whole life and AP Calculus brought you to your knees during your senior year and you made your first B, it is highly unlikely, inconceivable really, that you’re going to see your offer rescinded. Academics are a primary cause of rescission, but only in egregious cases. Let’s say you were an A-B student when you got accepted, then in senior year you failed an elective here or there and only passed the things you needed to graduate with Ds. That looks more like falling off the deep end and is a much more likely scenario to see rescission come into play.


Remember, colleges do require a final transcript upon graduation so they are going to look at your senior year grades. Another academic pitfall relates to colleges that use a self-reported academic record at admissions. This is an increasingly popular practice where colleges ask students to supply their academic history themselves rather than receiving it from the high school. This relies solely on the honor system but colleges will require the final transcript from the high school at the end of the year. If you accidentally said you got an A in your art class your freshman year, when you actually got a B, it’s probably not a huge deal. However, if you forgot about all eight of your Cs and the fact that none of those classes were AP level like you said they were, that’s bad.



Lastly, there’s discipline. This is the other very common impetus of letters of recission. Your first-ever detention for sending a text message in class is a non-issue, but a felony charge for drug possession is a different story. Colleges will discover these significant lapses in judgment and might feel that your presence on campus is more trouble than it’s worth. Whatever the case, make good decisions during your senior year and don’t do anything that makes you even need to read this!!

COVID-19 Points to Remember for High School Students

In the wake of the COVID-19 crisis, things are obviously not running as smoothly as normal. As students wind down one academic year and begin to look ahead to another, there is the opportunity for a lot of things to fall through the cracks. So, rather than my traditional piece, I thought I’d just review a handful of miscellaneous points that students and families need to keep in consideration.





For students with more high school left to go:


--Take time to consider the courses you want to take next year and make sure you have conveyed those thoughts to your school.


--Make sure that you finish this school year strong, even if school feels different right now.


--Inquire about any fees or fines you might have at your school and clear those prior to the end of the school year.


--Make an effort to return things like books or technology you might have borrowed from your school to avoid fines in the future.


--Maintain good study habits. These days, schedules are altered, different people are home at different times and with those changes it might be easier to put school work on the back burner. Don’t let this happen. Developing poor academic habits now will make it harder to approach school the right way down the road.


--In addition to habits, think about skills. Watch out for the summer slide. If ever there was a summer to read a book or find some games involving math online, this is it.





For students headed to college:


--Ensure your final transcripts make it to your college. If you mentioned to your counselor in February that you might be headed to State College, that doesn’t count. Most schools have a formal way, close to graduation, where you tell them where you want your final transcript sent. Be sure to follow up on this.


--Stay in communication with your college. Teenagers are notoriously bad at checking email regularly but this is likely a primary way colleges will communicate with you.


--Be aware of changes that could impact an orientation you might be scheduled for over the summer.


--Familiarize yourself with your intended major’s course sequencing guides. You should be able to find this somewhere on your college’s website. Reviewing this would likely be an emphasis of your orientation, but it is unclear what orientations will look like right now.


--Make some decisions about housing. If you planned to start school in the summer and all summer classes are going to be online anyways, do you really need to pay for housing if you’re able to continue to stay with your parents? What if school doesn’t start back in the fall?


--Make an effort to get along with your parents. There’s a chance both of you were looking forward to a break from each other. You might be spending even more time together right now. You guys might even have more time together going forward if you were supposed to be headed to college, but campus is closed indefinitely. Make the best of it, and both of you will do better if you can reach compromises and try to keep the peace.

Is Your Child a Futue College Dropout?

I recently read an article in a magazine title, “Is College Still a Good Investment?” The article got me thinking about the concept. Does the lifetime earning a college degree provides still make up for the money spent on the rising cost of college attendance? I personally think it does and the article agrees claiming that college graduates earn an average of $900,000 more over their lifetime than people who only have a high school diploma.

However, the article didn’t fully address a segment of the population that I want to discuss; college dropouts. Students who begin college, but do not finish get the worst of both worlds. They spend a lot of money on college, they probably accrue debt in the process, and they don’t leave with a diploma that can lead to a better job and more earnings. That’s a double whammy.

In my job, it’s not hard to spot the potential future college dropouts. They have poor high school attendance, their grades lag, they have discipline issues at school and at home. Yet, Mom is in my office every week asking me about how to get into their dream school and where to look for scholarships (Insert eye roll emoji here).

From the parent perspective, I do understand. Parents envision their children going to college and to great things beyond from the moment they’re born. It’s hard to pump the breaks on that. Plus, some parents believe that if they can just get their high school student out of town and away from the high school friends that drag them down, maybe they’ll mature and get it together and start to realize their potential. I think there are circumstances in which that happens. It’s not the most common outcome, but it happens.

I’m usually a big fan of starting college right after high school and carrying forward the academic momentum, but there are circumstances where that just doesn’t make sense. Parents need to consider whether starting college right away is a good financial decision as well as a good decision for the social and emotional dynamics of their family.

There are plenty of students who I might have thought would have struggled in college who have done very well. I’ve seen outstanding high school students who have floundered in college and didn’t make it too. More than those though, are the students who are really struck with the bad “school habits” listed above and who are pushed into college before they are ready. They burn through thousands of dollars and end up right back at home and their high school job in a few months’ time.

Is your student really ready? Make them prove that they are. Hold them accountable and say, “No more absences, As and Bs, home by curfew every night. If you can do that, you can go. If you can’t, why should we spend the money?” Then ask yourself, why should you spend the money today? You can still spend it tomorrow when your child is ready.

College Admission Appeals

     As college admission decisions roll out, some of them come with bad news. The bad news a student did not get into the college of their choice can be very upsetting to a whole family and those people might struggle to understand that rejection. They might be inclined to not accept that rejection and attempt to appeal their admission decision. Every college has a process for that but there are some important things to consider.

      The first thing to know is, well, don’t get your
hopes up. When colleges review applications, they make a firm decision. In most cases, there might be some black and white criteria that go into it but there is also usually a lot of objectivity. I talk to parents who want to know why their child didn’t get into their favorite college. They ask, “what was the reason?” as they bang their fists on the table. The question is not that simple to answer. I kind of like to think of the process as being similar to the way I choose a meal off a menu at a restaurant. Sometimes I want chicken, sometimes I want a burger, sometimes I want noodles, sometimes I want tacos. I don’t have a rubric or set criteria that determine where or what I eat. It’s just sort of an overall feeling of I like this today or I don’t like that. So it is with application decisions.
     

     Once I’ve made my decision about where to eat and I’ve driven to the restaurant, and sat at a table, I’m probably not going to change my mind and suddenly switch from tacos to Italian. I’d probably only do so under some pretty extenuating circumstances. Again, so it is with applications and decisions. In order for a decision appeal to be granted, your reason for your request needs to be something fairly unique and difficult to control. “But she’s such a great student,” or “This is his grandfather’s alma mater,” are not likely to cut it. Granted appeals usually result from reasons more compelling like “My chemotherapy prevented me from focusing on my grades during my junior year,” or “After my dad died and we lost our house, I was doing the best I could in the classroom while working three jobs so my siblings could eat.” See the difference in those types of reasoning for an appeal?

     If you don’t have a really good reason like that, don’t hold your breath. A college has invested time in reviewing you and making their decision. If you don’t have some information that can meaningfully alter the scope of what they have already seen, it is unlikely your appeal will be granted. I tell the families I work with that ask me about appeals that it’s time to move on. I think the time and energy spent on that appeal would be better spent researching other options and adjusting to the idea of somewhere else. If a student spends the spring of their senior year pinning their hopes on something that is very unlikely to happen, they won’t be emotionally preparing for what is most likely to happen and that can translate to more negative experiences down the road.

School Choice

Around the turn of the twenty-first century, a new concept began to grow in prominence in American education. We might know the umbrella term for that concept as school choice, but school choice can come in a wide variety of forms and the differences in those forms can be confusing to those who don’t work in education. 

To simply define school choice, we can just say it is the existence of programs, organizations, or institutions that offer an alternative to traditional schools. As American schools are most clearly governed at the state level, each state has addressed school choice by now but the approach to that has varied significantly.

In some ways, school choice has been around for a long time. Students have always had the choice to attend private or parochial schools instead of traditional public schools and more recently, home schooling has been an option. Those still are options, but now students might choose to attend a charter school which is a school that receives public funding but is operated outside of traditional government control. Students who do attend a traditional school but one that has been regarded as producing poor results might now have the option to attend a different and presumably better school even if they do not live in that school’s attendance zone. Online schools have seen a meteoric rise in popularity as well, as those students usually have the ability to work and learn at their own pace and in their own time. 

The problem with some of these options is that they might cost money. How or why would a student pay tuition at a school if the public school was available for free. After all, as a taxpayer, it could be frustrating to pay taxes that funds the schools if you choose to not send your children there. In response to those sentiments, financial programs that surround school choice have been created by a number of states. Again, the extent of these can vary greatly from one state to the next. In some states, families and corporations are granted tax breaks if they contribute to organizations that provide scholarships to K-12 students that attend alternative schools. In other places, K-12 tuition might simply be a tax credit reported on a family’s state income tax.

In other places still, students might be able to participate in a school voucher program. In this case, a student can apply for a voucher from a state that they may use to pay their tuition at a private or online school. About 18 states have voucher programs and there is an array of criteria to qualify for them. In Florida, where I live, one voucher program requires a student to have a disability that is documented with either an IEP or 504 plan. Another, requires a student’s family to fall under an income threshold. 

The important thing for any family to know is that options exist for their child’s education. Families should explore these options as they decide which educational route is best for their child.

December Graduation

When we think about high school graduations, we generally associate that as something that happens in the months of May or June. However, there are an increasing number of students who desire to graduate in December or at the conclusion of their seventh semester. This can be a great option for some students but there are some important advantages and disadvantages to consider.


To begin, I should say that school policy on December graduation can vary from one high school to the next, so families should familiarize themselves with those policies before they spend too much time considering this option. It’s also a decision that should be well thought out and made in concert with good and timely communication with the school. It’s not a decision you can make at Thanksgiving dinner and then show up at school and announce, “I think I want to graduate in a couple of weeks.” It takes some planning and strategizing.


The biggest advantage for a senior grad is that it frees them up for the spring semester to either go ahead and enroll in college in January or simply work in preparation of perhaps starting college later. In the case of the former, students should apply as would any other student. They just need to indicate they plan to start in the upcoming January. Be careful, this might be a separate application than what other seniors are filling out during the fall. December grads might need to use last year’s application. Just make sure you’re paying close attention to dates and years. December grads are eligible for financial aid but they will fill out a different application than their fellow seniors as the FAFSA calendar begins in fall in ends in the summer. For both of these processes, it is once again crucial that students make a decision about a December graduation early on.


The cons of graduating early lie mostly in the fact that it just runs counter to the calendar of everything else that happens at a school. So, a student who is starting college for the first time in January might not have as robust of an initial college experience as a student starting in the fall or summer. The other students are in the swing of things by January, new relationships have already formed, December grads might be choosing housing from among the leftovers, orientation programs might not exist or be scaled back, it’s just not quite the same. There are also some fun goings on at the high school that a student might miss out on during the last semester depending on the school. Maybe those things wouldn’t be of interest to the student and none of these might be deal breakers, but they are worth taking into account.


Graduating in December is the right fit for many students. However, it doesn’t work for everyone and wrapping things on the early side is not a decision that should be made on the spur of the moment. It takes a lot of research, planning, and communication to get it right.