 Thank you for joining us for our freshman sophomore family night. Thank you for having me. My name is Kathy Hirsch. I'm one of the seven school counselors here, and our counselors are all lined up. We'll hear from each of them tonight. First, thank ACMI for being here. They're doing actually a live stream of this event, and we will have the recording posted on our website after the fact for anyone who wants to review or didn't get to join us tonight. So we'll start by showing you the breakdown of our school counseling caseload assignments. Students are assigned to us by their last name in grade level. It can be a little bit confusing, so sometimes you have to check the chart to make sure you're with the correct counselor. But this is our contact information. We are also fortunate to have an intern this year, Sophia Shavs, who was with us for half of last year, and will be with us for the remainder of this year. She's been super helpful. The assignments will be for four years, so you'll be working with the same counselor for your student each year. And we would like to share with you, this is actually National School Counselor Week, in case you're wondering. So, some statistics that Karen and Bachelor put together is that collectively we have 114 years of experience as school counselors among the seven of us. So we hope that helps to reassure you that we're very experienced and we'll do a great job working with your students. We'd like to point out one of our resources is Google Classrooms. We know students have Google Classrooms for their school work, and we've created a grade level Google Classroom for the school counseling department as well for each grade level. We invited the students, hopefully they accepted our invitation, but if not, they can still do so. And we'll be posting information, updates, timely updates throughout their time here in the Google Classroom. So it's just a great resource for them to stay current with what's happening from our point of view at Erelington High School. We'd like to share our mission statement. We worked hard on this. We'll not read it word for word in general. We'd like you to know that we are here to work with the whole student and to support all students and primarily work with them, meeting them where they are when they enter high school, working with them throughout the four years to help them develop social-emotionally, academically, help prepare them for life after high school, and support them any way we can along the way. So we do a lot. I think that this statement sort of demonstrates all the areas that we encompass as school counselors here at Erelington High. And we're all enthusiastic and looking forward to supporting you and your students on their journey in high school. I'm going to turn it over to Karen Bottschiller. Hi, Karen Bottschiller, one of the school counselors here. And I'm going to share a little bit of information about what a school counselor does and how we at Erelington High support students within the school counseling department. So I like to think of a school counselor as kind of a case manager. The unique thing about a school counselor is that we work with every student in the building. So every student is assigned to school counselor. It's not a particular group of students. It is every student in the building is assigned to a school counselor. So we have the unique opportunity to get to work with students in a variety of ways in high school. A couple of those things are academic counseling. So we work with students on their course selection all the way through tracking graduation credits and helping with the post-secondary planning process for whatever comes next for them after high school. So it looks a little bit different year to year. So your ninth graders have heard a lot about what to do over the next four years of high school. Your tenth graders in a couple of weeks are going to be hearing from us more specific about how to get involved as a student at Arlington High School and how to make it a really successful next two-and-a-half years of their high school experience. We do also because we have case loads that we follow throughout the four years of high school have an opportunity to provide and kind of navigate different interventions for students. So again, kind of as that case manager type role we are able to help students throughout the four years kind of just make sure that they have what they need academically and socially throughout their time here. Social-emotional counseling and you're going to hear more about all of these things I'm kind of giving a quick intro to them. So social-emotional counseling we do work with students in individual counseling. School counselors do short-term counseling with students and then you would provide an intervention where we're offering resources through either a school social worker or outside referral to somebody in the community. It comes up as needed, right? Every student is an individual. We treat every student as an individual. Their plan throughout high school is unique to that one person. We don't give, you know, kind of a blanket prescriptive list of things that each student needs to do. We give them a list of things and then say, okay, and then within that as an individual there's kind of different pieces to pick out and different things that can help each student. Our grade-level workshops are done each year so each counselor invites their own caseload into, we've been using the Discourse Lab which is upstairs from here. It's a wonderful space if you haven't been up there. New space in the new building for us to work with our students in small groups and really get to know them on a more individual level. We meet with them individually in our offices either by appointment or we take walk-ins. Whatever students need, we are accessible. We are available and really are working to support students throughout their high school experience. We also have meetings with families all the time. If there's something going on, if you're concerned about, please reach out to us. We're going to meet to strategize and see what interventions we can support putting in place here at the school. In terms of some specific things we do here at Arlington High School, so again our grade-level workshops we had our ninth grade to meet them in our groups. It was a wonderful opportunity, really the first time to have groups of our caseloads together and provided them again with information on how to be successful reminding them of graduation requirements and a lot of things that they should just keep in mind throughout their time here. In March we'll meet with the 10th graders in the same capacity where we'll invite them in and do these group sessions. Each counselor will invite their own students in and then we'll have some make-up sessions. That would be helpful if they can't make it to one of the ones that we invite them to initially. You heard a little bit about our Google Classrooms. Google Classrooms for each grade level so things that we put in there from our department are announcements, reminders and things that we think students should have access to. We try not to inundate them with too much information. We try to make it really kind of student-driven and making sure that it's information that the students need. Information as parents we'll send out an email and make sure that you're getting that information. We also do a lot of updates to our website. Our department website has a lot of historical information relevant information that is more current. Our announcements page always has links to things like this presentation. There's always relevant information available on our website. If you have questions it's a great place to look for information. Our department newsletter goes out on or around the first of each month during the school year and depending on the time of year it might be just something to keep an eye on and look at this time of year seniors are keeping an eye on it because it's a lot of scholarship information. Juniors are looking at it because it's a lot of information about the college and career planning process. So it's going to be different throughout the high school years of you as parents and how you access that information and what you use the newsletter for. We do individual meetings with students. Again students can sign up for appointments with us. They can email us. They can come in and just drop into our office. For available we'll welcome them in and be able to discuss whatever is going on that they need our help with. We do one-on-one course selection meetings. So this spring we will have classes come down and we will meet with each student individually to go over their course requests for next year that they are coming up with a really good balanced schedule. We can make referrals to the Learning Center. So that is a sort of study hall structured program guided by a teacher and so there's interventions that we can absolutely support getting into place for students. We meet with students and the teachers. So we take a collaborative approach to making sure that we are supportive students with having those conversations and really ongoing communication with teachers and parents. And we encourage students to use Naviance. So Naviance is our software you're going to hear much more in a little bit. Naviance is our college and career planning software and we introduce ninth graders to this. So they have access to it very early on in high school and we each year take a little piece of Naviance to introduce them to. So here's a little kind of neuro psychology piece of information for the night. So this is the adolescent brain and I'm going to read because it's kind of small print at the bottom. The frontal lobe is responsible for high level reasoning, decision making, impulse control, assessment of consequences, planning, strategizing, organizing, inhibiting appropriate behavior, adjusting behavior when the situation changes, setting priorities, estimating, and understanding probabilities. If any of this is like, whoa, the frontal lobe is something that my child is struggling with having developed. Just remember, the frontal lobe is actually a part of the brain that develops last. Most people don't have a fully functioning frontal lobe until they're in their mid to late 20s. So my message to you as parents tonight is to remember that teenagers will make mistakes. We will guide them, we will support them, we'll encourage them to learn and grow from those mistakes. And a lot of it is really science. And so please, let's work together to make sure that we're encouraging our students to really just do their best throughout high school and in the future. And then I am passing it on for some data and information to Ms. Gunson. Underdeveloped frontal lobe is a perfect send way to talk about the 2021 Arlington Youth Risk Behavior Survey Highlights. Before I jump into that, I just wanted to explain what is the acronym is, the YRBS. Just for a little background, this is a survey and it is just administered every two years in the US for grades 9 through 12 in both public and private high schools. So it's kind of an interesting tidbit. I thought initially that it was just for public high schools but it's actually for both. And the reason for this, the inception of this survey was to help monitor health behaviors that contribute to issues that high schoolers experience. So like social problems, health issues, both physical and social emotional. So this survey is administered in the odd number of years. So this is 2023, this spring your student is going to take if you opt in will take, participate in this survey. It's 87 questions I suspect will happen during an advisory period. And this information that we glean from it, helps us get a snapshot of how they're doing. Questions range, I took a look at it this evening just to get a sense of the questions they ask about seat belt use whether or not your child has driven in a car with someone who's consumed alcohol. They talk about relationship violence, vaping, use of prescription medication and other drugs. It even delves into sexual behavior, diet, physical activity and your students' relationship with social media. So this is a really important survey because it's it captures a lot of information. So I'm thrilled that this year for the 9th and 10th grade parent night we can talk about wire BS because it's going to happen this spring. So these results are from the 2021 wire BS here for the Arlington students. We were not surprised that 27% of the students reported that their mental health was not good most of the time. 2021, we were still in the COVID kind of the depths of COVID. It was a really hard time. I suspect you saw similar results at home. We certainly saw in students as well. 42% of HHS students reported that school demands caused them negative stress. 25% reported busy schedules and 13 about worrying about their future. I think the part about the busy schedules is particularly telling because this is a common concern for most families and certainly for staff here at HHS and that's during COVID. When things were still kind of throttled back of it. So we really try, especially as we gear up for our course selection in the next month and when we're checking in with students, balance really is the order of the day. I know that's kind of a loosey-goosey word and it feels like what are these people mean by balance and by balance we hope it means that your student isn't up until midnight, you know, late studying that they have a social life but they're not out until like the wee hours of the night in that you feel comfortable about their social and academic lives. And if at any time this feels off-kilter then we are really great resources. So we can kind of support you and support that student here in the building. Substance use the YRBS asks questions about it. Overall a trend and this is probably no surprise. It increases as the student progresses in high school. Curiosity as they grow older. More experimentation is pretty common as the grades increase. Alcohol was the most commonly used substance by AHS students. Over a third of them are reporting that they had consumed alcohol in the prior 30 days since they, when they administered this survey. And AHS students generally assess substances through friends or family members. The family member piece is typically around prescription drug medication. So I'm sure you hear this through that pediatrician as well, but it's important to be really mindful about what's in your medicine cabinet not only to protect your own children, but also if you have other kids, you know hanging out at your house as I'm sure many of you do. So it's important to keep an eye on that. That can be a quick thing that kids can get their hands on. So just be mindful of that. Then the support networks and treatment access. This to me felt really positive. 81% of AHS students reported that they are able to use coping strategies to relieve stress. That's pretty amazing, right? So advisory lessons at the high school work in ninth grade PE and wellness. It's not just like the gym class that we remember where it was, you know, how many hangs can you do from the bar or whatever or push ups. It's like they really talk about mental health wellness and social media wellness and how to support these students. 61% of AHS students reported that they have at least one teacher or other adult in the school they can talk to. That's great. We'd like to see that number go up and we are hopeful that the results of the 2021-2023 YRBS should demonstrate a higher number there. There is, you know, between teachers, school counselors and school social workers there's a really good support network care for your student and we're happy to connect them to be their boss or a school social worker if they need. Then 82% of students that they have a parent that they can talk to with that is fantastic. Just one tick above that they have a coping strategy but that's good. That speaks to the resilience of this community and the positive relationships these students have with their caregivers so, you know, like hats off to you all for fostering and continue to foster those positive relationships. I say this to this like if there's a student in my office and they're struggling there is not an adult in this building who would go back to 9th and 10th grade themselves right? But we're here willingly because we love working with your students at this age range but it's hard to be a high school student so that compassion and understanding you've shown them at home I can't tell you how much it means to them and that correlates here at the school. And then 17% of ages students receive care through prescribed medications not uncommon. Many students take medications for many reasons whether it be for executive functioning or anxiety or depression or whatever the case may be that is not uncommon here at the high school and we support whatever a student needs to do in order to be healthy. And now I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Roy for Trans and Social Media. Thank you. Good evening everyone. Once again my name is Matt Roy and I'll be jumping in with Trans and Social Media. So I think to an extent we all know the strong influence that Social Media has on teenagers, right? TikToks and Instagrams I'm sure there's a dozen other but I think it's important that we recognize how active our students are in the cyber world and what that activity looks like because in a lot of ways Social Media can be a fun, harmless way of interacting with your peers but then in other ways it can be misused and even abused at times. So two terms that I want you guys to be familiar with. One is cyberbullying. Cyberbullying is using an electronic device to bully another. Typically this is done by sending messages of threatening or intimidating nature. This is nothing new you know for the past decade or two we've all been aware of this and certainly if you feel at any point like your student might be a victim of cyberbullying please let us know so we can help. Now the other term I want to mention is digital footprint. So digital footprint is information about a person that exists in the internet do or as a result to their online activity. So where I think a lot of our students are familiar with cyberbullying I think they've been educated on that they understand for the most part what's right and wrong I don't think they're as familiar with digital footprint. I think a lot of these Social Media platforms tell you pictures disappear in 24 hours or messages you can unsend but I don't think the students understand the permanency of what they're putting online and they might not always be thinking about who they're sending or sharing that information with okay so we just want to make sure that they're aware that they're protecting themselves and not putting themselves in vulnerable positions. Now I also wanted to include this statistic from the 2020 study that shows that 36% of college admission reps were checking applicants social media profiles as part of the application process and I assure you that number has only gone up in the past two or three years. So 42% of the time it had a positive impact on the students application and the way I read that is it didn't have a negative impact and 58% of the time it did have that negative impact and I think it's just students need to be aware of the photo content, the messages and even just the user names making sure that they're appropriate that they're mature that their representation of themselves in the best way. So working with you folks on helping us with monitoring that social media but also helping us monitor the signs of distress we really love collaborating with parents because we see it as we have eyes on your students while they're in school and we like to share that information with you where you guys have eyes on them after school and we like you guys to share that information with us. So as counselors we really take pride in the fact that we get to know our students we build relationships we understand who they are as individuals their normal behaviors but it can be a little tricky in ninth and tenth grade because we haven't really met them enough times to understand what's normal behavior and what may be what we've been in distress so freshman we may have met a couple times at this point, sophomores maybe four times at this point so we're going to get to know them better as they progress through high school but we want to make sure again that you folks are working with us to let us know if something you're seeing is out of the ordinary maybe they're starting to display drastic mood changes so of course all high schoolers have these mood swings but they seem more extreme but more frequent you know communicating with us letting us know that there might be more of the story here declining academic performance and that's not to say hey in term three my student went from a B plus to a C plus you know bringing all the supports you got it's more so to say okay we're noticing a decline in a lot of classes or multiple classes we're noticing that their academic behavior has changed their attitude towards school has changed changes in sleep patterns are they up all night, are they napping in the afternoons of course substance use feelings of hopelessness or worthlessness this is a big one because students will have moments where they're feeling overwhelmed and anxious they have a big paper or a test they might feel helpless how do I get started that's not as concerning as the student who feels hopeless that things are not going to improve or they're losing their self-worth in that case please let us know immediately poor personal hygiene, changes in eating patterns loss of interest, activities and hobbies lack of energy motivation and certainly withdrawal from friends and family because our goal here is we want students to feel as connected as possible we want them connected with their teachers, their peers the school, extracurriculars, the community and when students start to sever those connections or withdraw that's really alarming the sense of we need to figure out what we want and get them reconnected okay so again just working with you folks to help identify any signs of distress that may come up so universal screeners we have two screeners here at Arlington High School we do a mental health screening for all students unless there's no doubt from 9th to 12th grade we do that both in the fall and in the spring and this is to help identify students who may be struggling with anxiety and or depression this is not a diagnosis so we're not saying students have anxiety or depression based on this brief survey we're just checking in with students to see who might be in need of a follow-up conversation right now when we have those follow-up conversations of course we'll loop you folks in to make sure that you are aware and we'll also share the supports that we have available to your student we have amazing social workers here who do great work and they even have follow-up groups for students who may be struggling with anxiety and depression to help them build coping skills moving forward we also do an expert screening for all 9th grade students and expert stands for screening, brief intervention and referral to treatment and referral to treatment doesn't mean we call the ambulance referral to treatment is a conversation that we have okay this happens in the springtime and this is a public health approach so it's across the state that can deliver an early intervention which is alcohol and your drugs in unhealthy ways so I just want to emphasize that these screenings are here to support students by no means are they punitive we're not trying to catch students who might have had a beer over the weekend or something like that we're here to support students who may be falling through the cracks so that's why they're conducted so just for you folks again we want to make sure you have this information hopefully you do not need to use it so if you're ever looking for outside of school support we first recommend that you consult with your pediatrician hopefully your student has a pediatrician that they have a relationship with also you know medical professional we defer to the experts consulting with your health insurance provider to see what services or programs may be available to your students the Arlington Youth Counseling Center the AYCC does great work with mental health counseling for any students who may benefit from that psychology today I know for some families who are looking for therapists it's been pretty challenging lately we have heard some pretty good things about psychology today about finding local therapists who are available and seeking new clients Massachusetts Behavioral Health Healthline is a caller text center for students who may be struggling with mental health or substance abuse again but great things about them and our intern Sophia has put together vaping resources so we've seen kind of a resurgence of vaping with our high school population it's something that we definitely want to have conversations with and help students recognize the negative health effects of vaping and addiction it's really important to if you guys are noticing habits at home vaping that you're having those conversations with the students or informing us and then in school supports we don't mind at all being that first point person if you guys have concerns and you're looking for more support in school certainly feel free to reach out to your counselor we also have our mental health resources listed on our AHS school counseling website if you want to visit the page and see what's available again plugging our amazing social workers for students who may need a little bit of extra help in the social emotional area and just to note we have some great programs here such as Harvard, Shortstop Workplace Summit Reach I'm not going to dive into those because they deal with very specific populations but this is more so just to show you guys that we have a lot of interventions, a lot of resources to help students get through high school and hopefully leave here ready for those next stages of life right so I'm going to be passing it off to Amy Lyons, we'll be discussing academic planning at AHS Amy Lyons, can everybody hear me okay? so I have the end of the alphabet so for 10th graders I have the last names T through Z and for 9th graders I have the last names F, Y through Z how many 9th grade parents out there just kind of curious because that's the majority I'm also a 9th grade parent and I also am a parent of a senior and a eighth grader so three developing frontal lobes in my family we'll stop at like that so academic planning was very, you know, it was popular and it's been touched on balance in academic planning a little bit, the emphasis is on the balance in terms of not taking on too much you work very closely with your students in terms of creating that right balance that, you know, that you're not taking on too much because when you do take on too much you know, more than one thing is impacted I've seen that in my children in terms of, you know, how to decide on the right balance we work closely and we decide my recommendation would be to challenge yourself in the things that you're most interested in when it comes to senior year we're writing college recommendations it's really kind of great to tell a story about a student who's passionate about, you know a specific area and also to show them, you know, touch on the coursework that they've also had in those areas of interest so balance is a big deal graduation requirements I'll go through these we do, students take 30 credits per year full schedule they have to carry 30 credits per year so obviously when we go through the graduation requirements we'll see that the minimum credits are below that these are minimum graduation requirements so obviously most students will end up with around 120 credits for the end of their high school years so in terms of graduation requirements it's 106 credits by the end of senior year 4 years of English 3 years of mathematics to include algebra 1 and geometry and algebra 2, 2 and that but we do recommend, we highly recommend that students have 4 years of math the UMAS system college system will require 4 years of math so this is again minimum requirements but we highly recommend the 4 years of math 3 years of science again students should go as far as they can these are minimum graduation requirements 3 years of social studies which include U.S. History 1, U.S. History 2 and modern world history 2 years of a world language preferably in the same language again the math state college system recommends and usually requires the 2 years of the same language so obviously the further you can go with world language the better off UAS very beneficial in all sorts of areas in the future 1 year of fine arts that can be music or studio art a combination 5 courses in PE so students typically have a 1 PE class in 9th grade probably 2 in 10th grade and 2 usually in junior year so there's some adjustments to that students fit it in where they can to get those 5 credits done and passing score on the ELA the math and the science evercast and 40 hours of community service so UAS students the students should create an account on x2bold.com they can just Google it and create a password it will say my student my school suggested that I join so you hit join and click on there and they create their account and they can start to log in those hours so the recommendation is to definitely not wait until the end of the 4 years to have those 40 hours so students should have at least be doing 10 hours per year for later on in the national audit side they require 30 hours for a requirement students are considered for that so they have to have that minimum required so a transcript I'll put up a sample transcript but transcripts only the final grades are listed on a transcript for grades 9 through 11 and senior grades show for each term both the weighted and unweighted GPAs appear on the transcript a weighted GPA is out of 5.25 and unweighted GPA is out of 4.3 we do not rank, we do not do not line up those GPAs and make a class rank for the highest GPA to the lowest sophomore, right now sophomores they have their GPAs in Naviance in the college and career system for the ninth grade because that ninth grade GPA was calculated at the end of last year at the end of this year our new ninth graders will have their GPA calculated and that will be available in Naviance at the end of the school year this is a sample transcript I can't really see it, it's really small am I my screen here but the one thing I do want to mention too is the transcript so you'll see right here the class the level the grade and the credit for each month see that listed for each year at the bottom you'll see unweighted and weighted GPA you'll see the final grades from ninth to eleventh and senior grades in progress even though we calculated GPA here lots of times colleges don't follow and they will recalculate the GPA and one other thing colleges later on if that's what your students path is they do like to see an upward trend that's kind of an important thing not so much how they started but how they finish and what kinds of things that they accomplish and take on and how they mature over to Kathy so a couple of things I want to touch on here what is the course selection process for next year which we are about to begin students will be asked to enter their courses they'd like to request into their power school account between February 20th and March 5th those are the target dates from the assistant principal so you can see online we have the program of studies for next year posted there some new classes for students to take a look at some new electives so it's an exciting time for students to make choices for next year one part of the process that will be different this year is that we will not be having teachers put recommendations for courses into the computer system for students so we're going to ask students to sort of think about their current experience are they feeling like they are well challenged where they are they have a good balance and maybe they want to continue at the same level or are they ready to challenge themselves a little bit more in a subject that they are very interested in or as opposed to that are they overwhelmed this year and maybe they over did it with the levels and the choices of classes we'd encourage them to take a step back next year so we want them to consider their experience put their request into the system and then the students will meet with their assigned counselor in March or April we'll call them down by specific classes and sit one on one with them to take a look at how they are doing this year what they are interested in doing next year tracking the progress toward graduation requirements so we'll be there to answer any questions and make recommendations along the way also the piece of teachers not making the formal recommendations we still do encourage students to speak with their current teachers about you know if they are uncertain about what to do next year that's the best place to start the conversation you know to start considering what's going to be the best fit for that student and moving on a little bit to some academic help and tutoring options for students we encourage students to begin with their classroom teacher if they are looking for extra support in the subject all of our teachers offer either before or after school time for help for students they post that time in their classroom they let the students know when they are available this is the best place to start and I like to tell the students who are writing the test who are creating the assignments so they know exactly what they are looking for from the student so this is really the best place to go for assistance the teacher gets a sense that the student is really taking an interest in the class can assess the skills level that they've seen so far in the class so working directly with the classroom teacher is the best first stop another resource that we have here at school is called the learning center which is open daily from 8.30 until 3 so during the school day this is a room staff with a teacher who is available to work with students on an as needed basis so some students like to go to the learning center because it's sort of a quiet place that they can get more work done with open campus here in Arlington High with the building under construction sometimes I think kids are it's not as easy to find that quiet place to settle down and get some work done so this is a great space that offers that and also offers a teacher who can help you with maybe it's organizing your work planning what you're going to do for homework the next night reviewing an essay helping to understand math concepts so they didn't understand in class sometimes that helps to hear it from another teacher so students can be assigned to the learning center it's all voluntary if they want to do it on their schedule or they can use it on a drop in basis we definitely have space available in there this year so if that sounds like it's something that would be helpful let your students counselor know and we can work on getting that rolling we're also fortunate to have support from juniors and seniors who are the national honor society and they are acting as peer tutors for students and they can be accessed on a drop in basis of the learning center either before or after school daily as you can see they put a little sign on the table that they're the national honor society tutors additionally we can request an assigned one on one tutor based on an area, a subject area that a student is looking for assistance in we put a link into the form to request the individual tutor here it's on the Arlington High School website there's an actual page of the national honor society so it's worth taking a look at if you're looking for support for your student it's also a great page to look at if your student aspires to be a member of the national honor society and you want to take a look at what the application process looks like, the requirements the community service that needs to be completed by the time they apply so that's a worthwhile resource to take a look at I'm going to turn it over to Carol and Russ to talk you through some of the features of our system that we use called Naviance so some of you may already have an account if you've had students who are older in the school or who have graduated already you might be familiar with it but Naviance is a comprehensive college and career research tool that we use with students throughout the four years here so more heavily so in 11th and 12th grade but starting right away in 9th grade students got their accounts in December during our freshman group workshops and they take different self-assessments to learn about their strengths and weaknesses and as they can improve upon they can start looking at careers they can build resumes and then more towards junior and senior year they're researching different colleges building a preliminary list and then come senior year with a lot of the logistics with the applications and requesting transcripts filling out surveys for teacher recommenders and things like that so we work with them in the groups in Naviance and individually and you all will get an account if you don't already have one as well also just to mention that counselors and teachers submit all documents to colleges through Naviance so it's a very important tool for our department and for students here and so in the 9th grade which we had our groups in December students took the intelligences inventory and also the learning style inventory and so these just give comprehensive reports and these can also be reset at any time throughout the four years if they want to take them again but they give a lot of really great information about their strengths areas where they can improve it also leads to important information about possible good career fits and just starts the whole self-assessment and planning for postgraduate life in college in 10th grade so we're going to be meeting after the break after February break and we're going to be introducing students to the personality profiler and the career cluster finder and show what those look like in a minute and again these just give really good a lot of information about different careers and what could be good fits for them based on their interests and strengths and so parents I'm going to send out actually an email tomorrow to all 9th grade parents with directions on how to set up your account because parents have an account too sophomore parents should have received theirs last year if you didn't you can email your students counselor also if you have an older student or someone who's graduated you can email your students counselor to have this new student linked to that student because it doesn't the system is a little funny it doesn't let you have multiple accounts with the same email so definitely get in touch and you'll be seeing that tomorrow for 9th grade parents and so this is the view that students and parents see when they log in to an audience so for the 9th and 10th grade we're really focusing on that self discovery tab up there and I'm going to show you the different assessments and come you know junior and senior year we work more off of the colleges tab so colleges I'm thinking about in 11th grade which then will transition over to the colleges I'm applying to tab in senior year if that's the direction they're going of course we talk about other post graduate options too that has a lot of wonderful information and this is just a view of all the different self assessments that students can take over the years and we can again like I said we can reset them if a student took something earlier in high school and then you know come junior or senior year they want to retake it to see how things have changed we can certainly do that and they can look at their results at any time so each survey that they take gives a full report that they can go back to and look at as they're planning and researching so this is an example of a student when they took the intelligences inventory and it just shows the results so basically it's looking at their areas of strength based on their own answers to what the different questions ask and then the report gives information about you know the strengths in their intelligences and then how to improve upon maybe the ones that are less developed it also is fun to look at because the report gives famous people that have the same strength that they do so it shows all the different different people and then also different possible careers that can be good fits based on the results and then there's also a careers tab so everything's kind of connected but this is just one example of a view of some of the careers so it's alphabetical and it shows lots and lots of data about different careers so salary, pathway to the career, what education or skills are necessary and just traits of students that would make them a possible good fit and they can also mark these careers as favorites so it builds like a nice list of different things that they're interested in and also it shows in the career tab it also groups careers by clusters so it shows different options of different occupations within different kind of groups or fields which is nice because it gives good ideas of things they might not have heard of that are still within that area that they're interested in and so something else one of the other surveys that we have them take in sophomore year is the career cluster finder so this is just an example of someone's results where it shows this student looks like they're interested in more of the business management or government sort of fields so it just shows some nice related occupations and then also related college majors and then colleges that have those majors so there's really a lot of great information that students can kind of look at on their own you can look at it too and just familiarize yourself and it's a nice start to the postgraduate planning and also I want to mention that come 11th and 12th grade students can do our internship program so it's actually coordinated by one of the English teachers Ms. Edson and they'll be information coming about this when it comes time but it's something that students can sign up for as a class into their schedule their junior or senior year and there's many many different sites based on what they're interested in so she works with the student to find a good fit and a good site and they can actually get credit for that as well so lots of good things on this tool and again contact any of us if you have any questions or need help with your overcapped so I'm going to pass it on to Danielle Hi everyone, Danielle Rokowski we're saving the best for last I know many of you are interested in hearing about some college stuff so the first thing I'm going to say is we don't put any pressure on the students, our message is well balanced focus on your interests relax freshman and sophomore year because this time next year I should say freshman have a couple of years, sophomore is one more year by this time of students junior years that's pretty much when we start the college process with the students so just to kind of give you a little timeline so as we know the college process is very stressful and there's a lot to it so I wanted to just give you some basics tonight and we will have time after in any size we'll have time for questions and answers so if you can just hold them until the end just like you guys have done a great job with this time so how colleges choose candidates so it's a very holistic approach colleges are looking for well rounded students and one of the most important pieces of the process is the high school students transferred so when colleges look at a student the first thing they see is that document and they look to see what courses they've taken how strong the curriculum is is there a trend upward trend has the student increased rigor since ninth grade have they challenged themselves and they take into consideration the levels of courses like Miss Lyon said earlier are they focused on their interests do they take courses that they're interested in and pursue that and basically how is the overall performance okay so I would say the number one thing like I said is that strength of a high school transcript so some freshmen come in and they have a hard transition and they might not do as well as they had hoped or they come in and do awesome and then maybe one term of sophomore year they had a terrible term it's okay as long as the trend goes this way alright so that's really what is most important the next point which is written up here is standardized tests so SAT or ACT I have no idea what the landscape is going to look like in two years, three years okay right now the students are currently in a situation where most schools are test optional we're hoping that many colleges stick with that and stay that way but at this point we don't know what it's going to look like when your students are applying to college we are seeing that some class of 2025 students some of the schools are waving for the 2025 class so we'll see how it continues and I just want to say one more thing this slideshow will be posted on the school counseling website so you can see the links like fair test you'll be able to click on that link through the slideshow but fair test is a good resource to see a list of schools that are test optional obviously that will update continue to update over time extracurricular involvement so our message to students is quality not quantity it's not about how many extracurriculars they can fit into their life and what they can do every day and what they can do every year we say think about your interests stick with those interests try to continue with those interests over three to four years so if it's a particular sport or a service club or an activity really try to be consistent over four years at the high school college essay so students will focus on that end of junior year beginning of senior year that's an important piece teacher and council recommendations so we write for all of our students and students will also have to ask some academic teachers junior senior year and then special talents and circumstances so special talents could be anywhere like sports or dance or anything outside of the ordinary and circumstances have had circumstances that have impacted them in any way so we say holistic approach these are the pieces that colleges look for and I'm just going to focus on the words balanced and well-rounded those are the most important pieces standardized testing schedule each student has their own standardized testing scheduled for the most part so transfer students that come in here they might have a little bit of a different MCAS schedule but for students that enter in ninth grade there's a science MCAS in June typically it's physical science there are some students that will be taking the bio if they're transfer students tenth grade is math and ELA so March and May of tenth grade and for the most part all students will have met their MCAS graduation requirement by the end of tenth grade if a student happens to not pass a science or pass an ELA or the math MCAS that's okay the students have ten times to retake it before graduation so we have plenty of students that come in at all random times of the year they just jump into a different schedule to take the MCAS when needed so they'll definitely meet their graduation requirement PSAT typically the test is geared for juniors we offer the test to sophomores so it's optional follow sophomore year I'm not going to say any of us recommend that but it's there for sophomores if they want to take some practice and then we definitely recommend juniors take it for kind of like a good baseline indicator of how they would do on the SAT so MCAS June ninth grade math and ELA sophomore year eleventh grade October is first PSAT and then spring of junior year would be first standardized test SAT or ACT so we meet one on one with the students and we come up with a testing plan for them what makes most sense in terms of the college perspective and what schools are looking for and we iron out a specific plan AP exams are offered every May so whatever grade the students in the test is typically in May and if anybody wants any kind of prep Khan Academy has free SAT prep I am not in any way pushing any of you to go home to ask your student to start prepping but it's an option there if they choose to do so we also have a list of SAT ACT prep options on our school counseling website also linked here in the presentation so like I said in the last slide let's keep in mind no pressure we're really not trying to pressure them that there are so many schools that are still test optional so we're really not going to go crazy on the testing piece the one other thing I want to say about the SAT or ACT but the SAT is that if you've had older students go through the school or if you've heard of something called SAT with SA or SAT subject tests those no longer exist okay so you don't have to worry about that so earlier the MCAS was talked about with the graduation requirement I just mentioned the schedule now I want to just talk about two possible scholarships that come directly from MCAS scores okay so while we never pressure the students to take it I'm sorry take it if you never pressure the students to prep and go crazy to take the MCAS but out of the MCAS stores there are two state scholarships okay there's the Coplick scholarship and the Adams scholarship so I'm just going to quickly review the Coplick alright students need at least one advanced and two proficient for scores and two additional requirements that are outlined okay that could be an AP score it could be an award it could be a Syracuse University or a college class okay so the criteria is needed in addition to those scores and then the students find out if they are eligible to apply for this during junior year okay while the student is in college they must maintain a 3.3 GPA to renew that the scholarship I'll tell you the amount in a minute okay the Adams scholarship students are notified the fall of senior year and it is just strictly based on the scores for one advanced two proficient and they have to be within 25% of the district top 25% of the district and the criteria to keep this scholarship this tuition scholarship they have to maintain at least a 3.0 in college so money is money it's great so it's advertised as tuition but it varies by UMass or state school so it ranges anywhere between a thousand and two thousand dollars a year for a UMass state college university and around 800 a year for UMass State Community College so just to have a sense if students receive both the Coplick and the Adams our recommendation is for the student to pick the Adams because it's a lower criteria to maintain a 3.0 in college and they don't have to do anything else to apply for the money hang tight if you get that letter when your student is a junior hang out until senior year to find out whether or not they qualify for the Adams so we're going to have time we're all going to come to the stage in a second so you can ask us your questions but just like a quick wrap up so our message we've said tonight so many times well balanced well rounded don't go crazy keep things in perspective that's our biggest message we really try to decrease the stress level student well-being is the top priority that is the most important thing and plus our message when we have seminars, when we meet with students with families that's the most important piece balance getting involved in school, community anything activities to have that really well balanced high school experience I know there are majority freshmen parents in here but for those sophomore parents it's okay if students didn't do anything in their freshman year and they don't start till sophomore year that's fine parents don't go home tonight say you need to join an activity that's okay just know that it's important to get involved as the years go by communication and connection with teachers, counselors very important we tell our students all the time we're your advocates in the building please if anything comes up we're here to help in any way that we can and tomorrow morning totally up to you but we'll be hosting a virtual coffee hour with some of the counselors at 8.45 in the morning the zoom link is posted here it's posted in the email we received the email earlier today it will be on the school council website it will be all over the place so please feel free to join us in the morning if you'd like to say hello or ask some more specific questions okay so I'm going to bring all the counselors up here and hand the mic over to Miss Hirsch Matt's looking out for us there close to the agency perfect so do we have some questions bear in mind that this is being recorded and it is a live stream so we don't want to ask personal questions about the students here but there are some general questions yes so the question is around absences and the students who want to make sure they're staying within the allowed number of absences so absence policy students are allowed six absences per quarter on the seventh absence if a student's passing if it's unexcused the grade turns to what's called an FA failure due to attendance and it goes to a 59% okay so students passing now the student can earn back the grade that they earned in future quarters if they don't hit their maximum number of absences when the counselors meet with our students they are excused absences so when we pull them we try to not pull them out of any test quizzes or projects or anything like that but when we pull them out of the class that absence does not count against them in the attendance policy yeah anyone absent for a doctor's appointment or a dentist or something like that just get a doctor's note email it, have them bring it into the attendance office and that is an excused absence so if you go on vacation it's not excused and if your family if you guys deem it as an important thing I suggest call the dean or the attendance office and whether it's excused or not but nothing is really excused except for medical stuff at this point I would say talk to the deems my best answer so we don't excuse absences 6 absences per term is a lot of absences so if you do that over 4 quarters it's 24 absences a year that's a lot so most students don't hit their 7th absence per term PE 4 absences and seniors have a totally different policy but none of you have to worry about that right now so I want to get into that 6 un excused absences another question so the question is around community service hours that were completed this summer before 9th grade and we do accept those but not prior to that yeah the question was if there is an internship program that allows students to intern at different sites right? yeah so there is for 11th and 12th graders there is an internship program and it's kind of plugged into their typically it's G block but I think that can be flexible in certain situations but they do like to have that in that block so that they can like Miss Edson coordinates the program she likes to be able to meet with the students and she sits with them and finds a site in one of our placements based on which field they're interested in we haven't had that in a long time we don't have that but there are a lot of different places within the community that we have a relationship with for the program so she can I think there's going to be a presentation or maybe there already was for sophomores and advisory am I right about that? if not then that's going to be coming soon with the course selection process so she'll be talking about that the students are in the program currently talking about it so the question is why are the teachers no longer doing course recommendations for next year and is the login under the parent or the student to make the request the login process hasn't changed so if you were going in under the parent then that's the same process in terms of why teachers aren't posting recommendations I think we want the students to feel that they have some control over the choices that they're making and some kids may feel boxed in and not willing to question what the teacher put down for a recommendation for next year so we want them to be a little bit more thoughtful about their choices certainly access their teachers to have a conversation that might be more meaningful about what the student hopes to do next year and the teacher can give feedback along those lines and then to talk with the counselors as well about what might make the most sense so it's not that we're trying to have sort of a more thoughtful process rather than just simply the student sees one thing on the page and thinks that that's the end of the line for the conversation we don't have a formal process so the question is do the counselors get recommendations from the teachers directly but we don't, we can see the students performance in the class we can go in and see sort of the areas of strength and weakness for them among the assignments that they may be and we can facilitate the conversation between the teacher and the student if that's if you wish to do that so the question is how important are AP classes for college admissions and what's a typical number that students take that's a great question I think that there's no typical we really don't recommend more than two AP courses in an academic year because they require a lot of extra work it's on a scale of rigor AP is the highest rigor course here at the high school and at any high school it's important to understand that for AP courses students only send their score to schools that they matriculate to so well they send an official score report you can mention it in the common app but the most important thing about an AP course is sinking into a course that you're really interested in and taking that deeper dive in an area that who knows you just want to explore at a much deeper level so Dr. Janger requires his sign off if a student wants to take more than four and four is bananas when a student is sitting in front of us in our office and wants to take four APs our heart beats faster and we know what that looks like as far as workload so we want to support students to of course take AP and stretch and reach and challenge themselves but we certainly don't subscribe to take more than two three at max in the air and just one more thing we see the college acceptances and the denials and we know how many like I had a student get into Harvard and Georgetown with three total APs over four years so the culture and people think oh you've got to take tons of APs because you're never going to get into a good college just so you know that that is not true it's really important to look like I said with my slide holistic whole picture so the AP pressure it's there culturally and we really try to decrease it and diminish it but we've had plenty of students get into amazing colleges with you know a couple of AP exams of AP courses so the question is about the student counselor ratio being high and how much support do we offer the college essay the English teachers are supporting the students that typically spring of junior year in terms of writing their personal statement and you can even look on the common application to see the under like if you just google common application you can see frustrated applicants and you can see the sample questions there so to try to you know to begin to think and prepare but the English teachers spring of junior year really support the students so was the test optional for standardized testing for colleges trending before COVID or was it COVID that knocked that out of the equation we'll come down the other end here that's a great question so it was kind of a slight descent heading into COVID and then I think COVID was kind of the cliff that dropped it but colleges were starting to realize listen we're far more interested in what a student does each day in school over the course of four years rather than how they perform on one Saturday morning so I think they started to kind of weigh the outcomes there and at this point where we're slowly starting to research and come back to more normal times I think a lot of them are seeing we don't need that to be an important factor moving forward so we'll see the bounce back probably in the next year or so which will show us who's going to again recommend or require it but at this point it still seems it still seems that most schools are going to test optionally and hopefully that continues to be the trend yes I just said that we're starting to see colleges send us messages saying we are now test optional for the class of 2025 so they're starting to come on first they were like in 2020 they said test until 2023 and then 24 and then I saw BU the other day 25 I'm just saying it's like it's coming around not all schools okay because we know down south are still requiring standardized tests some places in the west coast standardized tests so yes it's an individual school situation but yes we're starting to see 2025 can't promise for 2026 but alright so I will answer the test optional question I'll repeat it in a second to take the service question okay so test optional is it beneficial to send scores I'm just going to answer this because I happen to be the SAT person so there's two things there's something called test blind where college is willing to look at the scores so it doesn't matter what you get and then there's test optional where students can send their scores if they want to send their scores but why the data is so skewed is because who do you think is sending their scores right now students that are doing really well okay so that's why we have individual conversations with the students and we say send them don't send them okay so we're pretty blunt on that you know we find colleges call us and say does that student want to pull their SAT out because it's going to hurt them okay even though we're like 13 50 I would never get that but it's really so it's an individual basis but that's a conversation we're definitely going to have with your student as it gets closer to their college application process the second part of the question is community service is it beneficial to log more than the 40 required so I usually recommend to students to keep track of all those things that they're doing whether it's community service hours whether it's just activities so we recommend to students to use the resume builder in Naviance to keep track of activities starting in 9th grade so by the time you're a senior they don't forget when it comes to community service hours we require that 40 before they graduate if they're here for 4 years so if you have a child who is a sophomore and you're new to Arlington High School they need the 30 hours what they could do potentially is use that as a placeholder and a place to go back and kind of revisit what they did earlier in high school it doesn't factor into anything different in terms of graduation we get a spreadsheet each month about our seniors and their progress towards meeting the criteria for community service and we're looking at that really for that 40 I think through X2Balt2 students can actually print some kind of certificate that says how many hours they've logged so it could be something that if your child is doing a large amount of hours beyond the required amount it's a good place to keep track of it but there's no benefit to doing it in terms of a requirement for anything it was mentioned earlier for National Honor Society students by the end of their sophomore year need to have logged I think 30 hours total which is 10 more than a typical sophomore if we're talking about the average of 10 per year would need so yes and no there's a benefit to logging it but we're looking for about 40 by their senior year right here how many students are we responsible for so our current enrollment is about 15-30 and there are 7 months we can do them out it's fairly even distribution but you know somewhere in the 200 and some odd range we were fortunate to add a 7th counselor this year we were up at 250 before that so brought us down a little bit but enrollment keeps growing how many of these students is here 130 something so we're constantly growing here in Arlington High School it's a popular place to be so right on the Arlington High School website there's a community service page and there's a lot of options directly on that page students are also emailed by grade level when opportunities come up so usually it's through an email address that comes as a just community service at www.arlington.k12.mi.us we have two coordinators who work in the building two of our teachers send those out when opportunities come up there's a lot of and they talk about it in advisory there's opportunities definitely senior year it becomes crunch time and so we try to find opportunities for seniors to get in those final hours so each year there's definitely opportunities that students are made aware of and you know we're helping them to keep track of those as well and look at the numbers as we do for the students today so I know this on the club website on the AHS website but for the students section of the website there are all the different clubs and they have Google classroom codes with each club and tell who the advisor is and there's a lot of clubs that have community service options within them also there is one called the community service club which is specifically for earning community service during X-Block so that's what Ms. Perez has a little code is like right next to each club so they can definitely just join it and see what opportunities are there if they're interested and I was working with a senior who is in need of community service hours and an email went out to every student here about community service hours available over February break not that your student wants to do that but they get emails all the time about opportunities so if they happen to not know or notice them they can just take a look at their emails so the question is about the format for the SATs and how it's changing moving to computer based tasks and Danielle is our SAT coordinator so we will and I really don't want to be once we go digital someone else will be the coordinator so SAT is going digital in 2024 so it's very scary but your students will have plenty of computer based experience because we do the MCAS on the computer so I'm not totally sure infrastructure and what it's going to be like but starting spring of 2024 which is when the current sophomores will be juniors I guess yeah so I'm going to learn with all of you it's all I have to say it's going to be fun so that's a great question students on IEPs or with accommodations can they take a paper based test great question yes it's a specific accommodation that when the request is filled out we need to request paper based testing absolutely so so it's an important question and you're raising the point about your children and students having been heavily impacted by interruptions from COVID in multiple ways and what is the school doing to help support them socially and emotionally as we're working through some of those losses it's a great question and we've seen it in the building so have the teachers the increase in the universal mental health screeners this was an initiative that was brought forward last year one in the fall, one in the spring this is true in the middle schools as well we're trying to capture what are the needs of the students and how do we respond and pivot and meet those needs so the fall if a student screened high on the anxiety and depression scale they were offered immediate support through us through a school social worker and or a small group support setting where tools on how to reduce anxiety there were little learning modules an example of that would be how to meditation deep breathing so actual skills you know that would align with where there needed to be some support so those two mental health screeners are these are new this isn't the expert or the wire BS that I talked about so those were two initiatives in direct response to kind of the lagging social emotional skills that we saw as a result of COVID I think another response to that is a hiring of an additional school social worker here at the high school level so that is a really important addition to help make sure that we are that we're capturing the needs so the students here oh another thing I just want to mention to is in response to those that need necessary support Arlington high school actually the district of Arlington Arlington public schools partnered with this organization called interface and that was in an effort to help connect parents with counselors outside of school so that had mixed success but it was in an effort to address that need and concern I think we've had hit our eight o'clock time limit so thank you everyone for joining us this evening reach out to us with questions ways we can support you and your students we look forward to working with you thanks again