Is a student negatively impacted when he/she starts a new school senior year and has no “real” recommendations?
Can you ask any of the teachers at your previous school for recommendations?
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Recommendations often don’t come from your senior year teachers, anyway, because they haven’t known you for very long. Most often you would ask teachers from 10th or 11th grade - would that be possible for you to do?
My S23 asked his teachers during May of his Junior year. If you are planning on moving at the end of this year, I would have your child reach out to 1-2 teachers they have a good rapport with pretty early (March-April?) and see if the teacher might be willing to write them a letter over the summer and send it to their new guidance office. At my son’s public school, the teachers write one version of a letter and then the staff in the guidance office sends it out to any schools. If you know now what high school you child will be transferring to, you could also reach out to them to get specific instructions on the best way to get letters from people who are not current teachers at the school. I’m sure they do this all the time for coaches and community members.
Needing to ask one teacher Senior year would be fine too, it just puts a lot of pressure on the student to perform really well early (which is tough at a new school), as you need to talk to the teacher so soon. Obviously, students ask senior teachers all the time who they don’t really know–while not ideal–the teacher probably won’t bat an eye.
You may also want to talk to your current school counseling office. Our school
Uses Naviance, so if a teacher retires we are not able to ask the teacher for a LOR since they no longer have access to Naviance (this happened to my child both 11th grade AP English and AP calculus teachers retired and after long discussions with the school administrative office they told students to find different teachers and cannot use retired teachers since their access to Naviance was removed). If the school uses Naviance, may need to reach out to the teachers and see if they would be willing to send the LOR directly to Common App and would need to be filed under Other since the teacher rec on CA is disabled. Also, if new school uses Naviance, then common app also disables the teacher recommendation form in Common App- so may need to also follow up with your new school and see what system they use too so for logistic purposes your child can have a good face to face discussion with the teacher he or she plans to ask before he or she moves and the teacher will know what or how she will submit the LOR.