Wednesday, May 10, 2006

We're #193 and We're Proud!

Good Morning. This morning's coffee time was a little unusual. We ran out of coffee, horrors!, but husband was able to come to the rescue. We had some beans in the expresso/cappacino maker and was the coffeemaker this morning. Bless his heart.

Each week my son's high school e-mails a newsletter to parents who sign up for the newsletter to keep current of what's going on weekly and for the month. Yesterday's newsletter had some fun news about son's high school's standing nationally. According to Newsweek magazine, son's high school ranks 193 in the nation.

Newsweek measured how committed the schools are to helping kids take college level courses. These schools give the students an edge, regardless of economic background. They divided the number of AP and IB tests taken at a school by the number of graduating seniors.

Son's high school is still considered new. The school opened in 2000 and had its first graduating class in 2004. My son is in the magnet program with strong emphasis on technology, science and liberal arts. The leap to the top 200 is a considerable achievement as last year the ranking was 470. The school tests a higher percentage of students than most area schools, giving over 1300 tests to 700 students, about 25% of the student body. My son, a sophomore, took his first AP exam this year. All the rest of his courses are pre-AP level. His AP exam was in World History and we will know this summer if he scored high enough to receive college credit.

Five Houston schools made the top 200. I take comfort in the study's results as this high school is son's first public school experience. He was in private schools until 9th grade. I've had my frustrations with the system but son is enjoying the experience, for the most part. He wanted to go to a big school (his has almost 3,000 students) and learn to be more independent than smaller private schools let the kids live. This idea began to make sense as he became more and more interested in large universities like Texas A&M for college. We'll see how it all plays out.

"The difference between perseverance and obstinacy is that one often comes from a strong will, and the other from a strong won't." - Henry Ward Beecher

2 comments:

srp said...

Congratulations, as difficult as it is to get into schools these days they need all the advantage they can get.

Me said...

Be still my heart... running out of coffee. Whew. I was going to give you the name and address of my local dentist that saved me when WE ran out a couple months ago! (They have 'walk away' mugs - real ceramic mugs - and YUMMY coffee).