College counseling at APS high schools

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Sorry, sounds like you blinked and missed it.

Its actually way better at HBW, where the teachers are the counselors, and they are responsible for like 50 kids. At least they might know your students name.

This is HBW's actual model? That's terrible. Honestly. Being a teacher and being a counselor is not the same job and also being a counselor should not be a side job for a teacher.

50 kids? What? At H-B each teacher is also a TA and are responsible for 10-15 kids, and the TAs/homerooms are across all 4 grades so they only have 3-4 seniors at a time to be assisting with the college process.

Tangent. The question was specifically about the comprehensive high schools and college counseling. NOT about how HB handles things.

Thank you to those who have actually provided helpful answers.

I had one at HB and one at Yorktown and neither got particularly useful college counseling, for what it’s worth.

[Anonymous]

Do the math. Graduating class has N students and there are at most a few -college- counselors. The ratio is visibly over 100:1. Nearly all APS HS students (at least from N Arlington) will apply to colleges.

No matter how diligent and wise the CC is, there is no way they could offer personalized advice to each of their students.

In such situations, DC really needs to self-advocate and engage repeatedly both with the CC and with the teachers who might be willing to write recommendation letters for DC.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My kid's at WL but I don't think it's that different than Yorktown. The dedicated college counselor will send out emails about summer programs, scholarships, college reps coming to visit the school, alumni chats, etc. They don't meet 1:1 with your kid to talk about college. Your kid should be assigned a regular counselor and they will meet with them each year around this time to talk about scheduling. In junior year they will also ask what they are thinking about for college. Oh, and they will write the required letter of recommendation for colleges, but you need to provide them with all the information because they basically don't know one kid from the next. If you want advice on what colleges to apply to or what might be target colleges, you really need to do your own research or hire a private counselor. They do make Naviance data available to parents and kids so that can be helpful to see where kids from the school have applied in the past, whether they got accepted/denied/waitlisted and what their stats are (anonymously).

The experience is roughly the same at Wakefield.

Exactly the same for my Yorktown senior. We did a lot of our own research.

I'm not understanding why people are in such a kerfuffle about this. Why should schools provide 1:1 college counseling? Why isn't the stuff mentioned above that our schools currently do sufficient?

This sounds to me pretty reasonable for schools to provide:
Junior College Night! / 11th Grade Parents & Students

"Subject: Junior College Night! / 11th Grade Parents & Students

Dear 11th Grade /Juniors Parents and Students,

Join us to plan for rising Seniors at Junior College Planning Night Presentation:

Topics that will be discussed:

College Planning Timeline
Factors to consider and how to choose your colleges.
Factors colleges use to evaluate candidates.
Standardized testing
Application process & procedures.

We'll provide: Spanish, Arabic and Amharic simultaneous interpretation. Please refer to the flyer."

This is new information for Wakefield… they didn’t have an 11th grade college night until late May last year and didn’t give information on “factors colleges use”, testing or “factors to consider”.