Parents -- Organization Involvment for College Countdown

The College Countdown will provide your family with a framework that can be customized to fit your teen and your family. But teens have to do their part also. They need to have the basic skills to not only do their high school course work, but also move onto college. A caveat: The College Countdown is a tool for your family, but is not a magic pill for teens and/or families who don’t care. This process is fun, but requires work on everyone’s part.

You still need to be advocates for your teen in high school. If that has been your pattern all along, now is not the time to stop. If you haven’t been an advocate before, now is the time to start. Our kids shouldn’t have to fight for appropriate levels of academic opportunities (including properly trained teachers). That is our job as parents and educators.

It is our job to provide our students with a variety of experiences and skills in high school. Colleges assume that students have acquired them before they reach their doors. Research into career areas and the needed thinking skills and college investigation needs to start in the high school freshman year, or before. Imbedded in this process is also the scholarship search process. At the high school setting, parents need to ensure that our students have the very best, highest level academic offerings possible and a well-rounded experience fleshed out with involvement in church/community, after-school activities and sports.

During the summer, if possible, encourage and enable your student to be able to take part in programs that are out of the ordinary for your teen. Examples are employment in career goal areas, your state’s Governor’s School, Fine Arts Academies, university pre-college and/or pre-professional programs. Try and find experiences out of state if possible. Universities view successfully completed out-of-state experiences as a good indicator of academic risk-taking and forecast of a student’s success in college.

High schools and middle schools need to provide top flight courses which will allow our students to stretch and fly academically at all levels. We also need to provide for some nuts and bolts things that will allow our students to be students. There is nothing worse for a student than to have to forego a normal high school activity because someone didn’t put quite enough planning into the master schedule. Examples of this conflict would be Homecoming the night before the PSAT or Prom the weekend before or in between the two AP/IB exam weeks. Since these test dates are known for up to three years in advance, there really isn’t a good reason for the conflict.

We also need to ensure that each of our students, especially within the same family, are treated as individuals – they are not clones! Sometimes it helps before a teen enters a new level or building to have a meeting with the principal and counselors to discuss the student’s strengths and limitations. The goal of the meeting is to plan as a partnership how to further strengthen and enhance the educational experiences for this child.

• Counsel your teen to take as strong a curriculum as possible without overachieving. For some teens this will mean working as hard as possible to get all C’s. For others it will mean including upper-level, college credit and AP/IB courses early in their high school careers. It will only help in the college and scholarship search.

• If your high school has a parent academic advocacy group, get active!

• Become very familiar and friendly with your teen’s principal, class principal and counselors. The lines of communication need to be very open, constructive, and candid. If your teen receives support services from any specialized resource teacher such as in the area of disability and/or gifted education, work with that person to best help your teen. Stay involved all four years.

• Encourage your student to seek out summer programs and volunteer/employment opportunities in areas that will give insight into possible career choices. Great examples are part time jobs in an area of interest, pre-college university programs and mentoring relationships.

• Start the college search procedure during the freshman year.

• Look for opportunities to qualify for your state’s Governor’s school, Fine Arts Academy, college summer institutes in science, medicine, math and/or writing and other academic experiences whose admissions are also competition-based.

• Question a learning situation if it just doesn’t feel right.

• Ask those questions out loud.

• If necessary, take the risk and write a letter(s) to ensure the quality of your teen’s education.

THE COLLEGE COUNTDOWN – FOR PARENTS