High school is not just something that happens to you; it’s also something you do. And that difference between passivity and taking action is just what “High School Decision 2013” is all about, as representatives from two-dozen area high schools gather Thursday on the campus of Westerly School so that students and parents can easily compare the possibilities and make an educated choice about the next four years.
“Westerly School has the distinction of being the only school in Southern California to host an educational event that provides a comprehensive presentation of high-school options for families who live in Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Orange County,” says Head of School Chris Rodenhizer. “Last year’s event was a success and we look forward to continuing that tradition.”
Thursday’s event will be the fourth annual High School Decision event hosted by Westerly, an independent K–8 school.
Scheduled to be present this year are representatives from Wilson High School Distinguished Scholars, as well as independent and charter high schools, including Chadwick School (Palos Verdes Peninsula), Loyola High School (Los Angeles), Fairmont Preparatory Academy (Anaheim), Cornelia Connelly School (Anaheim), Mater Dei High School (Santa Ana), Lutheran High School of Orange County (Orange), Rolling Hills Preparatory School (San Pedro), Servite High School (Anaheim), Saint Anthony High School (Long Beach), Sage Hill High School (Newport Coast), Vistamar High School (El Segundo), Saint Joseph High School (Lakewood), Tarbut V’Torah School (Irvine), Rosary High School (Fullerton), St. John Bosco High School (Bellflower), McBride High School (Long Beach), Halstrom High School (Anaheim Hills), Santa Catalina School (Monterey), Brethren Christian High School (Huntington Beach), and Long Beach Polytechnical’s Program of Additional Curricular Experience (PACE).
“It’s a popular event, because these schools that want to recruit students for their programs—whether private schools or public schools that have special programs, like Poly’s PACE or Wilson’s Distinguished Scholars—there’s a little of competition amongst them, in terms of trying to get the best students to come to their program, because these are magnet programs at public high schools that are geared for top-performing students,” says Rodenhizer. “So it behooves them to have any top-performing kid know about their program. But it’s even better for private and parochial schools that charge tuition, because they really have a vested interest in getting students. So they get to come to a place where there’s going to be 200 to 300 people, and they can just set up a booth, and people come by and say, ‘Tell me about your program.’ We’ve had lots of kids changed their mind just based on meeting with the admissions directors of these schools. […] It’s one-stop shopping, basically.”
Lisa Marsh, who will attend this year with her 6th-grade daughter, can attest to the influence such an event can have on choosing a high school: her son is a freshman at St. John Bosco High School because of Westerly’s High School Decision events.
“St. John Bosco was not even really on our radar when we started this process,” Marsh says. “We’d heard of it […] but the reality is it wasn’t in our top three or four. […] Each year they seem to expand, and there’s one or two new schools I haven’t heard of or hadn’t considered. […] You can just go from booth to booth to booth, and you can also go into different rooms [where] they have full presentations. We went to one of [St. John Bosco’s] full presentations, where they had a little video [on which] you could see the campus, and then two members from the faculty spoke, and there was just some connection. There were things that they talked about that we didn’t expect for them to have—[for example,] music programs […] as well as athletics. And that’s what pushed us in that direction.”
Stacy Andersen, a parent of 8th-grade triplets at Westerly, has gone to all four High School Choice events.
“[F]or parents who have never been to an event like this, it opens their mind up to a whole new variety of what is available out there [in terms of] high school—I mean, magnet, charter, independent, private, boarding school, all-boys…,” she says. “It’s just stunning what you’re choices are. And I don’t think most people even realize that they have so many choices. […] If you have a child that has a special interest in math and science, you might want to look at CAMS. And you wouldn’t really even know CAMS is out there if you didn’t go to an event like this. If you’re child is really into the arts, there’s a theatre-arts high school he could go to.”
“It’s about choice, having the opportunity to ask, ‘What’s happening in the arts at your school?’ or ‘What’s happening to class size?’ [or] ‘How are teachers able to differentiate or individualize for my student when there’s so many budget cuts?'” says Rodenhizer. “Whatever anybody’s concern is […] the schools have to have an answer to that that meets the needs of those parents. And every parent has a different issue. That’s why it’s so important for the community to have choice.”
Marsh says that the event’s format is perfect for arriving at that informed choice.
“To be able to do a side-by-side comparison is a good way to do it,” she says. “I can ask the exact same question two minutes later to the next school and the next school, not forgetting what feelings I had from school to school to school. I can pick up packets of information from each school—they all offer a lot of material to consider. And I think that [over the course of] multiple years I became a little bit more savvy, and I was able to ask a different set of questions each year. I asked the surface questions maybe when [my son was] a 7th-grader, and then when he was an 8th-grader I had a whole different set of questions that I hadn’t considered before.”
In a time when education is woefully underfunded (even more so than what has long been the unfortunate status quo in the United States), High School Decision 2013 enables parents to get an advance look at what individual schools are able to offer along the entire spectrum of what the high-school experience can be.
“You’re looking for a curriculum that absolutely nourishes the whole child, and not just, ‘Four years, and let’s get out of here and move on,'” Andersen says. “You want an enriching experience, if you can get it. And there’s a choice out there.”
High School Decision 2013 takes place Thursday, October 25th, from 3PM to 5PM in the quad area of Westerly School (2950 East 29th St., LB 90806). For more information, visit www.westerlyschool.org. To RSVP, contact Dave Perram at [email protected]“>[email protected] or call 562.981.3151.