I do understand your divided feelings about it. Our high school handled it about the same. There were an invitation-only sports award night, but also the academic awards night.
If you think of it, given that 20% of families were attending in your case, it’s still a very substantial celebration - and your child is very publicly recognized among all those other highly achieving students.
Specially a public high school has to tread carefully not to seem to embrace “exclusivity”. I’m sure it’s not really a “secret” at all - the kids will talk, and among peers mention if they are going to whatever awards night, even some parents will talk - but the school will also be mindful not to “rub it in” the face of left-out parents.
The alternative would be do invite all parents into a huge venue - but then, why should 80% of parents and kids actually want to sit through two hours of only other kids being called on stage, possibly repeatedly?
At graduation, our school did not allow any kind of ribbons/decorations, such as NHS or similar - it was something my daughter did regret.
Just FYI that this varies from school to school. At my son’s school, AP Literature is seen as one of the hardest classes in the school, and only about 20 kids total take it (all senior year. On the other hand, there are 3-4 classes full of kids taking AP Calc Junior year and even more Senior. The assumption is that all serious students take Calc
Similar at our school. There is no class rank, no val or sal, no recognition of any laudes at graduation, etc. Student speakers audition to a student committee unrelated to academics (and usually poorly correlated with academics – more a popularity contest), plus the senior class president.
There is a separate “senior awards night,” invitation only for the subset of students and families it applies to, with the results not mentioned anywhere outside of the event. They cover a combination of academic, department, some sports, arts and DEI-related awards, for example ranging from all the National Merit Finalists (they held the certifications the school received for this) to all the graduating students from the school paper to recognition of students attending HBCU’s, etc. It’s a ton of awards, and extremely uneven depending on how the individual activities and departments decided to handle it. The paper and theater groups, for example, give something to every senior while the music groups and art give it to only a couple seniors (despite having orders of magnitude more students participating in those activities). One core academic department gave out one award, and another gave out a dozen. Often awards had very specific criteria that didn’t closely relate to exceptionalism. For example, one academic department award required the student take two classes in the subject, but that automatically excluded all the kids who tested out of the lower rigor class and went straight to the hardest one, and it was the only award for that subject.
Still, it was a nice night and its great they had a wide diversity of awards for a wide range of students.
Our HS is not known to send kids to top schools. Out of a graduating class of 220, not one kid got into an Ivy, despite 10+ kids applying to them. My daughter was rejected from the 2 she applied to, and was waitlisted at BC - we were very surprised at BC. Top rigor, 1530 SAT, very meaningful ECs, published research, and she’s an outstanding writer. No kids from her school got into BC either. She has not received her AP scores from this year yet, but last year, she took 4 APs (all that was offered junior year) and got 5s on all of them. Obviously, her teachers prepared her well (her classmates did equally as well). Her HS does not weight GPAs and most kids from her HS go on to community college.
We are a predominantly white, middle-class public school in Upstate NY. Apparently, our school and our students don’t stand out. The last kid to be accepted to an Ivy from our HS was 3 years ago, and she was accepted to Harvard to run track. It’s disappointing.
This sounds like a miserable awards night! we have athletics and fine arts awards nights and the awards are standardized so that each sport and each fine are award the same awards, mvp, most improved, etc… Then we have an awards ceremony the whole school attends where they award academic medals for graduating seniors over a 4.5 gpa, 4.0 gpa, then one department scholar award for math/science, humanities, etc… and then Val and Sal. I do like that it’s all very clearly laid out.
I’m guessing from your comment about 10+ kids applying to Ivy’s that either the school is quite small or the number of kids who apply to them is a very small subset. Our public HS in NJ gets a decent number of Ivy admissions each year but I would also bet that the majority of the student senior body (of ~400) applies to Ivy’s, so we essentially bought a lot more lottery tickets. I’m not suggesting this is the only reason.
My C23’s (and soon my C25’s) 11th/12th-grade high school does nearly the same—there is a valedictorian and salutatorian,* and district-mandated gold honor cords for every student with a GPA≥3.5 (weighted or unweighted, they don’t care), but otherwise any awards are given at the awards night three or so weeks before graduation.
*Val and sal are, by district policy, based on weighted GPA—but it’s a DE high school, and also by district policy DE courses are not weighted. This has the weird effect of a few students trying to game the system by taking fewer DE courses and fitting in a single AP course each year (they’re allowed one course at a regular high school per semester). The result is that the val and sal aren’t necessarily the academic all-stars.
And I figured it’s worth a separate post to offer my periodic reminder that the folks who frequent the CC fora are not normal (in the statistical sense, certainly, and probably not the colloquial sense either).
Most of the college-going graduating seniors out there do not apply to the HYPSMs or WASPs of the higher-ed world. Also, the average number of college applications college-going seniors submit is <2.
There are also, as @neela1 points out, regional differences in college-going preferences. For example, there are >40k students in my kids’ school district, so yeah, there are a number who apply to the HYPSMs and WASPs, and a handful who end up going to them, but it isn’t baked into the local culture that of course you want to go to a hyperselective college—the in-state options are crazy easy to get into and provide a solid education so they’re good options, and if you really want or need to go out of state Western Washington, Montana State, Montana, Washington State, Portland State, Arizona State, and Utah State really actively recruit here and many of those offer easy access to WUE tuition rates, and for those who want a private and LAC and/or religious place, Lewis & Clark, the University of Portland, Grand Canyon, Linfield, Puget Sound, Seattle, Seattle Pacific, and Willamette all actively recruit from here. And hey, if you really want to go someplace harder to get into the University of Washington is a pretty good deal.
So yeah, it’s worth remembering that what CC leads one to think is the “default” for college-going goals is really only the default setting for a particular (and small) slice of the population.
Just a reminder that incoming freshmen should get their Meningitis B vaccines. Your kid has probably NOT had this shot already.
It’s different than the Meningitis ACWY vaccine that most of your kids have likely had already. Those were the serogroups that previously sickened students the most, so that vaccine is often required in high schools and colleges.
Nowadays, Meningitis B is the dominant serogroup, but vaccine requirements haven’t caught up to that change. Some colleges require the Men B vaccine, but most don’t.
This disease isn’t super common, but it can kill otherwise healthy people VERY fast.
If they get the first dose of Bexsero soon, they can get the second dose 1 month later and have both done before they go off to college.
Call their pediatrician or your local health department to schedule their first dose today.
My daughter took a number of lit/humanities AP classes (7 in all) but reg math and science, and in those subject areas, she was at max rigor. She worked incredibly hard understanding regular pre-calc and regular physics: she went in for extra help, she read the books I bought her (physics for dummies!), she sought help from friends and watched online tutorials. She got As in those classes, too. But she graduated hundredths of a point away from being summa cum laude, bc with those reg math and science classes, she was just shy of the necessary GPA (4.25 weighted at her school).
I am giving an example of the point that dfbdfb has made eloquently, over and over, on this post. Unweighted GPA is arguably a much better measure of the effort a student puts in than weighted GPA, and the courses alone do not speak to how hard a student worked, or how deserving a student is for the accolades that come their way.
I think math has more to do with progression, and that was often determined years before.
Some kids come in ready for geometry, some algebra 2, sometimes pre-Calc, occasionally AP Calc AB or even BC, though this is not very common. They follow the path along with most finishing with AB or BC.
The strongest students will overlap in other classes, regardless of the math class they are in.
California requires it, but yes go get the Men B vaccine! We went yesterday and the doctor only had Bexero, 2 doses a month apart, and not the Menactra that is only one dose.
As far as I know, both Men B vaccines are 2-dose. Bexsero doses are separated by 1 month, while Trumenba doses are 6 months apart. Menactra is the ACWY serogroups – I didn’t know they could do it in one dose now! My kid had 2 doses of that one.
There are ABCWY serogroups, and the ACWY shot(s) plus the B shot(s) will give full coverage. I really wish there was better info communicated to parents about the B shot. Hardly any kids get it (~30% for Men B vs ~90% for Men ACWY).
Back when I was in high school, a healthy football player in my school died with no warning from meningococcemia. The tragedy shook our school and community. A close classmate was also sickened and nearly died. She missed a full year of school. It’s not common, but it’s not rare enough to take the risk of passing up the vaccine.
Good to know! With my S15 it wasn’t required here yet and I almost missed the timeline to get him two does before we moved him to school. I just didn’t know much about it and hadn’t thought it through.
Our family doctor was telling us how hard it is to convince lots of parents to do the second set of meningitis vaccines while she was giving D23 her second Trumenba shot.
I wish it surprised me more, but I remember the huge pushback regarding the HPV vaccine as well, which our doctor said very few of her families want to accept at all. For us, a vaccine that will prevent certain cancers? Thank you modern medicine!
I have a last day of school potluck tomorrow and I’ve just got no bandwidth so I’m bringing…sliced watermelon. I’m a good cook, but I don’t have it in me to do anything else at the moment!
we have athletics and fine arts awards nights and the awards are standardized so that each sport and each fine are award the same awards, mvp, most improved, etc… Then we have an awards ceremony the whole school attends where they award academic medals for graduating seniors over a 4.5 gpa, 4.0 gpa, then one department scholar award for math/science, humanities, etc… and then Val and Sal. I do like that it’s all very clearly laid out.
(~30% for Men B vs ~90% for Men ACWY).