Thank you and College Night (The Right Choice)

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prin...@sethigh.org

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May 14, 2023, 11:06:28 AM5/14/23
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Dear Students, Parents, and Guardians,

  • Thank you for the treats!
  • Happy Mother's Day!
  • College Night (The Right Choice) Tue, 5PM in-person and on Zoom
  • College and Career Planning at SET

Thank you for the treats!

Thank you so much for all of the treats that you brought to the teachers throughout the week.  The flowers and the sign were also a really nice touch.  The SET PA has been absolutely amazing this year and the staff are always talking about how great the parents are.  We all feel really supported.

Inspired in part by the amazing support of our parent community, Ms. Geis and I are planning to have a monthly evening therapy/support/connections group with the parents next year called "The Village".  We know that it takes a village to raise children, and we know that each of us is only involved in a small piece of the students' lives, so we should be working together to make sure that the messaging that we are all giving is, at minimum, consistent in theme.  We work to have many different kinds of voices among our staff at SET, so I'm definitely not advocating that we all be on exactly the same page as parents, but we should learn from each other in the ways that we have successfully (or unsuccessfully) raised each of our teens.  Our voices will be unique and distinct, but hopefully we will find some shared nuggets that work for each of us that help our SET students reach their fullest potential while navigating the typical stresses of teenage life.  I look forward to us building on the community that the SET PA has managed to create, and moving us towards "The Village" where events like today's Volleyball picnic (thanks Mr. Snow!) are common place.  As much as teens try to push us away, they really want us in their lives (but maybe on their terms!) and each one of those pushes is a test to see if we'll pull them back in.  Let's pull them back in together!

College Night (The Right Choice) Tue, 5PM in-person and on Zoom

It's time for the Spring edition of College Night.  For this one we will be discussing an extremely important topic that has been on my mind as our current 12th graders (and my son) made their college choices on May 1st.  This is a College Night designed for all 9th, 10th, and 11th graders because the decisions that are made now (even as a 9th grader) will have an influence on the kinds of opportunities that will be available in the future.  This is not a talk about how to get into the best college, though.  This will be about choosing the best college for you.

When: Tue (5/16), 5 PM

Where: SET High Den or on zoom

Please RSVP if you will be attending in-person.  I would rather there be an in-person audience to make the discussions and interactions more natural, but I will probably just connect from home if everyone plans to attend virtually.  So don't come to school if you don't RSVP!  No need to RSVP if you will be connecting via Zoom.  I will be recording the event and will post a link to it sometime next week in case you are not able to attend live.

College and Career Planning at SET

One of the items of discussion after our WASC visit was how we can improve our college and career planning for our students.  We realized that we have some really solid bones in our College and Career program, but that the main problem is with our communication with parents.  Ms. J, our college counselor, focuses on the Seniors in the Fall and on the Juniors in the Spring.  The one-on-one conversations that she has with each of the students do not always make it home, though, so we have added a new step and deliverable to these one-on-one meetings.  There is already a "tutoring log" in CoreCompetency that was originally designed to log tutoring interactions that we had with students during COVID.  It automatically sends home an email to the parents when an interaction occurs.  From now on, the notes from each one-on-one College and Career interaction with the student will be logged in this system so that the parents, school staff, and students can all be on the same page about what was discussed.  I think this will help a lot.  As we get experience with the kind of content that gets logged, we will improve the College and Career planning component of CoreCompetency to make it more useful for students and parents.  The logging will be a good first step, though.

So, if you start to see emails about specific college and career goals for your student, that's why!

Also, we have some really good college and career content for advisory that Mr. Wallsall created a few years back that really helps the students focus in on their future from 9th grade on.  Unfortunately we have been using the advisory period this year for other activities that we feel are more urgent as we work to identify the new struggles that students have post-COVID.  We will spend some time over the summer trying to recalibrate our priorities and will try to squeeze the college and career activities back into the schedule.  If there winds up not being enough time in the school year for us to fit in everything, we will at least send the activities home so that the parents and students can discuss future planning around the dinner table.  This might be a better option anyway now that I think about it.  Regardless, we'll work on reintegrating college and career planning into our curriculum.

Thanks everyone and thanks again for the treats!  Happy mother's day!

Dr. McCurdy

 

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