On September 13, many of our parents attended “Meet the Teacher Night” at Tappan Zee High School. I had the honor of speaking to these parents briefly and mentioned that I would post my speech online along with associated resources. My remarks were centered on three essential elements that parents should consider as they support their students in high school:
- Student transition to adulthood: Monitor your child’s progress, but not too closely. The key concept here is to “trust but verify.” This is not only for them to start gaining independence but for you to maintain your sanity as well. You don’t want to wait until your son or daughter is a college freshman to start “cutting the strings” without having had an opportunity to help them transition into adulthood during their high school years. Help them to transition by giving them small tasks like doing laundry, time management scheduling, and managing personal finances. Avoid becoming so overly focused on the college admissions process right now that you overlook other aspects of their development…be aware of their college admissions goals, but remember that there’s more to life than “checked boxes” on an academic transcript.
- Student self-discovery: Encourage your children to discover and explore their interests through coursework and extracurriculars. TZHS offers dozens of athletics teams, 50+ clubs and a wide range of general, Regents, Honors and AP electives, including courses such as: Aerospace Engineering, Chorale, Forensic Science, Law and Literature, Sports Marketing to AP Computer Science A and more. In spring of students’ sophomore year, they are introduced to the Naviance Family Connection website, a tool for post-graduation planning, through their school counselors. As your student approaches senior year, his or her school counselor will ask your student to provide a resume (examples are on the website), a senior questionnaire, and a parent perspective questionnaire. Your child will complete the resume and senior questionnaire. You, as a parent, will complete the parent perspective survey. Even though these requirements are due early in their senior year, it’s never too early to start looking at these requests from the guidance department. The senior questionnaire and the parent perspective survey can be a very helpful guide to some very powerful conversations between you and your TZHS student (regardless of what grade they are in). When the time comes, share your thoughts and feelings with your counselor so he or she can better guide you and your child in the college admissions process.
- Enjoy the moment: Lastly, enjoy these years as the parent of a TZ Dutchman. As we start to have discussions about life after high school, we may forget to cherish this very special time. It is especially important that you assist your child in discovering their passions and how those passions allow them to better interact with the world. These high school years are a great time to develop ideas about what academic areas are of interest (or, equally important, not of interest) to them.
Best wishes for a great year!
A list of “Key Dates to Remember” for 2017 – 2018 is posted under the “College Readiness” section on both the TZHS For Students and For Parents webpages. The direct link is: http://blogs.socsd.org/tzhs/key-dates-to-remember/