001good evening everyone my name is chris davidson i am the principal of the freshman academy here at danbury high school i'm joined by dr roy our deco director i don't know if you can see her or not but when she starts speaking you certainly will and mr salvatrini our athletic director um so what are we here for tonight first of all i want to talk about the freshman academy what is it why is it there how's it different from the rest of danbury high school and how's it different from from the middle school you may be used to i want to talk about registration what do you need to do to get the classes that you want for your 9th grade year i want to talk a little bit about the supports and extensions that
002are available to our students dr roy is going to talk about the danbury early college opportunity mr salvatrini is going to quickly talk about athletics i have a quick pto plug in there because they asked me and then we're going to talk about what's next in the process and then take some questions at the end throughout the presentation if you take your phone or any device that you may have and you scan that qr code it's on the corner of every one of our slides you can enter a question into our form and we'll answer those questions at the end as we go so the freshman academy what is it our freshman academy was put in place several years ago to help ease the transition from ninth grade or from eighth grade to ninth grade
003we found that our freshmen really struggled with the res the new responsibilities with the new freedoms that come along with high school so we put some supports in place to help them transition a little more effectively from eighth grade to 9th grade it's a teamed approach so we have eight teams of freshman academy teachers we offer college prep and honors courses in those in those teams our counselors are tied to a team similar to the way they are in middle school our teachers have common planning time with other members of their team and the freshman academy really allows us to to offer some additional supports only to freshmen that the other uh students in denver high school don't have access to um our new freshman academy started in the 1819 school year brand new building
004in the back of our d building it's actually a really really beautiful place to to be we have 26 new classrooms there six state-of-the-art science labs we have a gym down on the bottom floor with outstanding locker rooms probably the coolest thing literally and figuratively is is the air conditioning because it gets really really hot at danbury high school early in the school year and late in the school year so air-conditioned g-building is outstanding for everyone who gets to enjoy it rg building most ninth graders will spend three out of four of their core classes so maybe they'll have english math science in g building and social studies out out of g building so three quarters of their core classes will be spent in in the new building in one quarter core class outside of
005the new building so we try to make it equitable so everyone gets to experience that but uh we just didn't have enough room we have you know eight teams or four teachers doesn't equal 26. you can all do the math a little too small so that's what it looks like you can see our science labs with the big science benches it looks a lot different now in covid times but that's what it looks like in a normal school year and i'm going to give this presentation um praying that we have a more normal school year next year so i'll show you all the pictures of what it's supposed to look like so absolutely outstanding views the best views in the in the entire school out the back of g building um we have a really
006really cool gym in the bottom that we use for wrestling and some other sports too and we can do some some small gatherings down there which are fun just just an awesome space that our freshmen really have enjoyed for the past couple years so credits probably the most important thing to understand going into danbury high school is our credit system so students earn one half credit per class per semester so for english class semester one you earn a half credit for english class semester two you are a half credit um if you pass that class with a 65 or better you earn credit so i want to say you earn credit just by going to the class but you have to actually earn the credit by scoring 65 or better and the way that works
007is for semester one uh quarter one and quarter two are averaged together and if that average equals 65 or better you get your half credit for that class semester two is the same way the big difference between high school and middle school is if you don't pass you uh you don't get credit and you you don't move on so in middle school if you're in math class in seventh grade and um you know it's tough for you and maybe maybe you don't pass the class you're probably going to be in eighth grade math next year but not at danbury high school if you fail algebra one you have to take algebra one again and if you fail algebra one a second time you'll have to take it a third time which is going to put
008you in some some real jeopardy of graduating on time so it's immensely important that you understand that these credits all add up to the 25 that we need in order to graduate now from freshman sophomore year you need six credits so when you accumulate six credits after your freshman year you're officially a sophomore so if you don't it doesn't necessarily mean that you know you're left behind without your class but in power school it's not going to show you as a 10th grader um you will need to to get back on track you know in order to accumulate enough credits to graduate in time not to end the world some students you know may have five and a half at the end there but but our goal is six so that you can be matriculated
009to sophomore year on time so i talked about those 25 credits and it's like a big jigsaw puzzle all those 25 credits have to add up in the right way to get to that 25. all students at danbury high school must get four english credits so four full years of english english one two three and then english four or an ap class and we have ap lit and ap lang that could supplement or take place of english through your english four you need three and a half social studies credits those must include world studies modern world us history civics and you can put an ap class in there too you need one fine art credit could come from art music or theater arts but you have to earn one credit of fine art in order
010to graduate you have one elective credit that fits in that humanities could be any one of those humanities courses to satisfy that science technology engineering and math you need throughout your career to embryo you need to get nine stem credits four from math three from science including bio and chem and two stem elective credits i'll talk about the elective credits in a few minutes career and life skills you need a health credit you have to take health or you can't graduate danbury high school you have to take a full credit of pe so two half years of phys ed in order to graduate one career in life skills elective and you need a personal finance um credit as well world language one full year world language we recommend more than that um you can talk
011to your school counselor or your son or daughter school counselor to talk about different college opportunities but but most colleges like to usually three years of world language we only require one at temporary high school we have a mastery based diploma assessment don't worry too much about that that's embedded in your classes as you go through denver high school so don't think oh my god i never signed up for this mastery based diploma assessment it's embedded in there i promise you will show that you've uh you've shown mastery throughout the year throughout the years at danbury high and you have a student choice for 1.0 to equal that whole 25 that you need so i know that's kind of confusing and and giving all those different criteria make may make you a little scared but
012here's what you need to know um going into freshman year so you have some choices to make but not a whole ton of choices we have a fairly prescribed um course sequence especially for freshmen but what you do get to decide is whether you're going to take college prep or you're going to take honors level courses now one of the things that we make freshmen do is whatever they choose in english for that level college prep or honors they have to choose in social studies so if you take college prep english you have to take college prep social studies if you take honors english you have to take honor social studies now the same thing is true for math and science if you take honors math you have to take honor science college prep math
013college prep science you could do college prep and english and social studies and then you could do honors in math and science but in inside those boxes on the screen in the blue box you have to choose the same level for those and in the orange box you have to choose the same level for those i'll talk a little bit about college proponents what the difference is next but um freshmen may be required to take a reading or a math lab for additional supports depending on you know their background and their skills coming into high school we recommend that all freshmen take health and phys ed to kind of get that ball rolling get it out of the way early so you can start taking some more electives as you become an upperclassman and a
014limited selection of electives which you'll see on our next screen after this um but the big choice really is is college prep versus honors and people always ask what's the difference um college prep is going to prepare you to go to college you will learn all the content that you need to be successful when you go to college if you choose to go so we're preparing you to to be successful in college honors you're going to learn the same things you're going to cover the same content in all your classes but you're going to be asked to do a little more with that content we're going to ask you to to go a little deeper to do more work outside of class the honors level courses are more rigorous and require our students to to
015really take a little bit more of the ownership of their learning outside of the classroom so those are the two difference two differences between college prep and honors if you're stuck give your middle school counselor a call send us an email if you really want some our opinion and we can help you choose the best one now whatever you choose for college prep and honors right now you don't have to stay there for the entire year so when you come to danbury high and you say wow i totally should have taken should have taken an honors class because this college prep is too easy for me during the first two weeks of school the first 10 days of school you can make schedule changes and move those levels so it's not set in stone so
016do your best guess right now to decide what's most appropriate for your son or daughter or for you if you're you're an incoming freshman but but it's not set in stone you have you have some wiggle room when you get when you get here in full i could spend two hours just going over what's taught in all those classes but we don't have that much time so if you're curious about what's happening in in english one or you want to know what's going on in um in world studies check out those those other tables that the department heads are doing and they can answer those specific questions and if you you know you don't have time to go there send them an email or send me an email and we can answer those specific questions
017as we as we go along so the electives so outside of those core classes we offer opportunities for students to take elective classes in rotc we have several art classes they can take these are only available to freshmen there's more when they become sophomores juniors and seniors but this is the freshman elective schedule business courses are out there family consumer science we have a pretty wide selection of music courses you can take full and half year elective choices we have electives in science outside of traditional biology technology education we have some some theater arts classes and our different world languages so what might that look like when you're a freshman so you may request all your classes and you get your schedule in powerschool in august and it looks something like this so it says
0181a college prep english 1b world studies 2a you've got bio 2b you have health and pe split between semester 1 and semester 2. you have your algebra 2 honors 3a you say i take spanish 2 because you're you're pretty good in spanish you're pretty fluent so you went with spanish 2. and during that fourth block you have ap computer science principles so you may say mr davidson what is going on with all these ones twos threes and that one little weird four on the bottom so the way things work at danbury high we do not have a straight a b schedule i wish we did but unfortunately we do not blocks one two and three meet every other day so one a two a three a is going to meet say on monday and one
019b two b three b is going to meet on tuesday the next day now that fourth block class it's shorter but it meets every day so on an a day you're going to go to 1 a 2 a 3 a and 4 a b on a b day 1 b 2 b 3 b and 4 a b so it's a shortened class it's half the amount of time as a normal block class but it meets every single day so for you people that like to see a nice little chart of what your week would look like those are those same classes in a sample freshman schedule here a days b days you'll see it repeats alternating as we go 8 a b day 8 a b day a day and you'll see that fourth block
020is is half the time of all the other blocks and there's this weird little thing called flex in the middle i have a slide specifically about flex but flex is a pretty cool thing that we have that we put in place to help our students be more successful than they've already been or to really expand themselves outside of their comfort zone further than they've done in the past so flex is dedicated time we embed it in the middle of the day and on monday every student goes to their mentor flex and they design what they're going to do for the rest of the week and that schedule is individualized so if i have a test coming up on thursday i may schedule to go see the teacher who that you know who's giving the test
021on wednesday so i feel prepared i have a little extra study session if i miss class on monday or i miss class on last friday i'm going to schedule tuesday to go see a teacher that maybe i missed an assignment in so you have the opportunity as a freshman in flex to schedule your week during that flex time to meet your needs could be interventions could be things that you need help with right things that you didn't feel comfortable about things that you just need a little extra support it may be interventions we have a whole lot of interventions that we embed into flex for for people that maybe they just don't need support that week or maybe they don't need support on thursday so they're going to do an enrichment activity we've done tire
022change tuesdays where you can go out to the auto shop and learn how to change a tire we've done yoga where we go down and miss lewis runs yoga classes i do a sid exhale um lunch bunch where students are are involved in the decision making through the sodexo company for our school lunch so they get to taste test a whole bunch of different things from different products from different representatives and decide what really works for for our cafeteria so we have a whole bunch of different things that that really fit the needs of our students be it enrichment or interventions everyone has flex so if your freshman tells you i don't have flex they're not telling you the truth everyone has flex every day so remember that parents don't let them pull it over
023on you because it's not true so how do we choose all these classes that's really the next step in in this battle the first thing you should probably do is check out our course of study guide it's linked right from our from our website we have english spanish and portuguese versions take a look at those courses it'll tell you a little bit about each one maybe what's in there what's available what's the progression in different departments to get an idea as to what you want to want to take as a freshman and beyond registration is super simple if you've been in danbury public schools before you have a powerschool account you log into your powerschool account and just like you've probably done for the past three years you click on class registration inside of class
024registration we allow you to request classes so you can request an english class i want college prep english one so i click on the little pencil and i choose college prep english one and do the same thing for social studies i do the same thing for math and science make sure because we are semester high school that you're choosing semester one and semester two otherwise it's a lot of cleanup for our counselors and for myself so that makes my life a lot easier if you make sure you check off semester one and semester two click ok for all your core classes you do the same thing for your elective classes but you don't have to choose all of them so you don't have to choose a full year and a half year art rotc business
025but you can if you want to so whatever you want in your schedule you can make a request for those classes to be built into your schedule when we do it when we do build those scheduling notes and this is really important requests don't equal registrations so if i request american sign language because i really want to take that for for my world language it doesn't mean i'm going to get that it means that i requested it but it doesn't mean that you're going to end up there there's a good chance you will but it's not 100 you know i request it and i'm going to get it so the way it works is we take all those requests and we figure out what courses all of our teachers need to teach we build the
026schedule and then we load students in there so if there's more requests or if a cert request doesn't fit into your schedule it doesn't fit into your schedule when you won't see it there but we do a decent job of getting everyone's requests um into those schedules if you're confused like i said before and you want some some some help from your school counselor ask them they're usually pretty in tune with with the requirements for college prep and for honors and they can give you you know a good scenario as to what they think you should do again it's your decision we don't force students to take honors or college prep it's a school of choice and if you want to take college prep or honors you sign up for it so you can get
027people's opinions but but it's your choice in the end of the day if your student receives special education services um still submit your requests but just know when you have your transitional ppt um you'll you'll kind of take a look at those requests and make sure it works out with your iep so um so go ahead and submit what you want it'll help that transition ppt run a little better or maybe at least get an idea as to what you want to take registration closes 319 so we don't have forever but we have a few weeks i imagine most of them get done in the first two excuse me what's available um when students struggle and students do struggle that transition to high school is not always easy we have a lot of supports in
028place that make our freshman academy kind of that intermediary ground between middle school and high school we have uh intensive reading and math intervention programs to support our students to help build those skills so that they can um build those skills and be ready for sophomore year in reading and math i spoke about flex time we have directed study hall so maybe a regular study hall doesn't work out for you i run directed study halls so probably the last place you want to end up but it's the right place for some kids they need that structure of up with my study also we do that we run after school tutoring program usually two days a week and outside from this year we do provide transportation home so you know you can you can take the
029bus to an elementary school nearest your house two days a week we run a twilight program so if a freshman were to fail a first semester course and i already spoke about how important it is to matriculate on time and earn all those credits that you can but for some reason it doesn't happen we offer an opportunity for the right situation where a student can retake the first semester course after school during the second semester so while they're taking the second semester in english one they're repeating the first semester so that they can get those six credits and matriculate on time and again we provide transportation for that we have a credit recovery program which is more self-paced it's not taught in a blended style like our twilight program um it's more computerized and students
030move along at their own pace and that's available in the future and we have a pretty good srbi intervention process to to look at what interventions we can put in place to help students in an individualized capacity as we go so what if i don't need any supports what if i'm doing a great job and i kind of i'm cruising through freshman year well then challenge yourself i always i always challenge our students when i go down and talk to them in middle school i say be more than just a student don't just come here and and learn come here and give back to to the danbury high community be involved in more than just classes and you can do that by taking one of our 23 advanced placement courses 19 of our kids take
031ap classes um 52 of our minority students which is which is outstanding and 32 percent of those kids who receive free reduced lunch but 19 of our kids take a shot at an ap class and many of them take several the best thing about ap courses aside from exposing students to that that rigorous college type curriculum is if you pass with three four or five you can take that score and you can earn credit in college when you do go there so that's a really good opportunity to save mom and dad some money and also get a head start on college so you can get some of those introductory courses out of the way flex like i said extensions and enrichment opportunities outside of interventions dr roy in a couple seconds going to talk about
032the early college opportunity we have a whole bunch of honor societies so if you're really interested in art we have the largest art on our society in the state so great opportunity to be with like-minded students that share the same passion as you and really allow you to stretch your stretch yourself accelerated summer courses if you wanted to take geometry over the summers to get it out of the way so you can jump into a higher math class certainly an opportunity over the summer we have a concave upward bound program that we can get some information on a whole lot of athletics that mr savastrini will talk about i think there's just about an activity for everyone at danbury high school between athletics clubs and classes there's something for everyone here it's just going out
033there and finding it and kind of taking the bulls by the horn taking the bull by the horns um again i challenge kids to be more than just a student i want them to to be kind of ingrained in the danbury high community so that's my challenge to them dr roy a little bit about the deco program good evening everyone uh the danbury early college opportunity is a partnership with naugatuck valley community college and oak branch which is a local industry they do capital management here in danbury and it is a program where students are able to work on a degree in computer science at naugatuck valley community college an associate degree while they're here at the high school so students are duly enrolled beginning their sophomore year at the college and at the high
034school the backbone of this um program really is to get students ready for the workplace so we have a series of classes called workplace learning where students learn the professional skills needed to be successful in any job that they go to they'll also begin their sophomore year with an intro to computers course at the college to say hey i can do some college level work this is offered to the students at no charge so this opportunity is very unique there are only four programs like this in the state and so i encourage students who would like to learn more about it to apply for our lottery the lottery is posted on the danbury high school website it did open today it is also posted on the danbury early college opportunity website so if you go
035to the danbury high school homepage scroll down you'll see some blue buttons one of them says deco if you click on that that will open up our website and give you lots of information we are also on um twitter and we are on um instagram and facebook so we have lots of information out there for you but basically the big difference for freshmen is that they would have one of their electives be a workplace learning course and so that would take up one full elective our freshmen also get the opportunity in the past we've been able to pre-covet have students come into the building early and kind of get to do some getting to know you and team building activities we do scavenger hunts we travel around the building get to see the building one
036of the benefits of the deco program is that i do work with the students throughout their time at the high school so i do work with 9th through 12th graders and then i also keep in touch with many of those who go on to college as well one other benefit of the program is that we do have industry mentors along the way who provide students with you know relevant guidance and advice as they enter their first jobs i think that's about it so for more information you can check out our website again that's my phone number at school welcome to call me if you'd like to speak personally or you can email me anytime thank you thank you dr appreciate it next mr salvation is going to talk a little bit about athletics what you
037need to do to be ready to hit the ground running or hit the field running whatever it may be with athletics in the fall thank you mr davidson um we we have a we have a very big program and mr davidson mentioned a couple times about adjusting to high school as your freshman academy freshman sports for us is a lot it kind of mirrors that a little bit getting our young people to make the transition from middle school activities youth sports and come into the high school and develop a plan for themselves as athletes at danbury high school generally we look at freshman sports as a opportunity for young people to learn about the high school a lot of kids involved especially freshman year we have somewhere in a normal year we would have upwards
038of three to 350 to 400 freshmen in in the first year just to get involved with with athletics the tenor of our program is about responsibility this is at the freshman level we we set the foundation for the for their four years responsibility we have character and themselves respecting one another their coaches and their teachers and balancing athletics with academics uh well first first time we'll say publicly to this group uh you need to compete in the classroom before you compete in the athletic field you need to handle yourself as a solid young citizen in a school in the hallways before you compete as a danbury high school athlete so we look to mirror both programs together now the goal of our program is to conduct a wholesome and worthwhile activity which consistent to the
039uh basic philosophy of denbury public schools that's a that's our goal uh participation in athletics at danbury is a is a privilege it's not a right so it carries the expectation that a student will behave in a responsible manner anytime they wear the the orange and blue in 2000 2021 again this is a little bit of an odd year for us as we're working through the covid but uh normally we will field 62 teams in 25 different sports we have 29 varsity 22 jv 11 freshman teams so for freshmen out there uh this fall we have cheerleading cross-country field hockey football soccer swimming and volleyball plenty of things to choose from plenty to choose from uh parents which most important is physical exams uh it's a requirement denbury public schools that a physical exam is
040updated in order to participate so the exam must encompass the entire athletic season so as an example if freshman sports begins on september 1 and ends on november 1 the athletic physical must encompass that time or the student athlete will not be eligible to participate so it's important that you start thinking about getting a physical because when we get to the summer time it gets awful tough uh to get physical scheduled on time uh next up we have um we talk a little bit about the family id family idea is where we uh do all our uh permission forms it's all online and parents can go in and register their child for a sport uh family id for the fall will open up on june 1. so you can't you can't register before that but
041june 1 through the three weeks in june there while we're in school uh you can register we'll be there to answer questions well all our coaches available to answer questions for you we'll do that even now but for as far as registering for a sport it would be june 1 uh for fall for a fall sport if you use you should use get your familiar with the website you go to the danbury high school website there's an athletic link there and you have everything there in front of you you've got eligibility coaches the forms you need uh general information the hall of fame handbook mission statement everything is there also there's the family id and it's pretty as we only have three or four items listed on on this on my little uh speech here
042tonight uh but our program is you're you're huge and we really focus in on the medical eligibility right now family id and communication um i will be happy to answer questions i can be contacted by email phone uh everything's up on the website uh my phone number my secretary's phone number we have two full-time trainers that manage the injuries for our athletes so we have a great base program for all the incoming freshmen who would like to get involved compete be good people build character and and develop a program so we can beat richfield every every year in every sport okay so um i wish you good luck if you have any questions please certainly give us a call mr davidson appreciate it we do have some outstanding athletics programs here at danbury high um
043but like mr salvestrini said you have to get it done in the classroom before you can get it done on the athletic field so focusing on your academics first is something we always preach to our freshmen and sometimes you know they learn a little too late when they come out and that average is just a little below what it needs to be and they can't participate so i don't want that to happen to anybody because it's sad so deborah iptl asked me to to give a little plug for them um they're a outstanding organization that does things to to support us in any way that they can so if that's something you're interested in if you were involved in pto in an elementary school in middle school and you want to reach out to them
044feel free i'm sure they'd love any support you can give them i know they they have the amazon smile thing so if you frequently shop on amazon a little bit can get kicked back to them through amazon smile stop and shop rewards and they're also constantly selling masks and and magnets so if you contact the pto you can you can take advantage of any of those opportunities so our registration schedule more like check mark when we we spent three wednesdays this month going and speaking to the middle school students to allow them to ask questions i give them a similar presentation but not exactly the same so that they can get a get a feel for what high school is going to be like tonight we had opportunity for parents to join along to online
045registration opens tonight it's really important to know in a couple weeks we'll do a private school so our non-public schools private parochial schools will get a similar info share they can't go into powerschool and register so we have to do something a little different for them in order to get their course requests when the window closes on 3 19 so when everyone's requested their classes we send them back to our students our counselors take a look at them and we make sure that it's exactly what students wanted to request when we hit june and school's over that's when we figure out what classes we need what every teacher is going to teach we set the caps we build the schedule and then in july we load the students in so once the students all go
046in there and schedules are finalized we open up power schools so students can see their schedules so you may say why does it take till july i promise you it takes till july there's a whole lot of moving parts with 3 200 kids to fit into all these different sections that teachers teach and we have to make sure it fits in the building and and throughout the process so it's a lot of work so be patient you will get your schedule i promise and what we typically do is we invite incoming freshmen in uh the week before school opens and like i said before i'm giving this presentation thinking that things are going to be a little more back to normal so they may not be the same size tours we typically allow but but
047i want to do tours because i think it's important for freshmen to get in here and see what the building's like so the first day is not completely overwhelming for them so they say you know what i do remember this hallway and i may not know where my english class is but i know it's somewhere down here and it makes it a little bit easier so that's something we're hopefully going to be able to do so if you have individual questions you want to contact any of the three of us um here's our contact information i'll leave that up now if i wasn't clear before on how to how to ask questions because we have we have a decent amount of questions but um your children asked way more questions than you guys did there
048was hundreds and hundreds of questions asked in the middle schools and you guys aren't quite there yet so if you take your camera any camera and you scan it over that qr code in the bottom right you'll get the form where you can ask questions so if i didn't if i wasn't clear on that i'm sorry it took me a while to learn how to use those silly qr codes too so questions we do have that came in um my child is attending the fall semester how many students are in a class we build our classes the majority of them for 26. that's what we put we put a cap of 26 on almost all the the classes that that we load and build in our schedule there's some that that doesn't work because 26
049heats can't fit in a particular class like food nutrition they only have 24 seats or a computer class you know doesn't have enough seats for that but the majority of them like i said is 26 so that's our that's our average and that's where most of our classes fall freshman classes might be a little bit smaller depending on how many teams we run and and how many kids are in each team but for the majority of cases 26 is our magic number do you need to have 25 credits each semester or by the end of the year neither actually 25 for your whole career your goal at the end of freshman year is six six at the end of freshman year 25 in order to graduate what grade do you have to get to pass
050all classes you need to average 65 to get credit obviously we want you to do better than that if if you go through your high school career and you have hundreds across the board that's fantastic but you need a 65 average between the two quarters of the semester to gain credit for that semester a lot of grading questions um if you did down below a 65 for a class but then you get your grade back up do you still get credit yeah so it's whatever your grade is when the quarter closes so if the quarter closes on um january 27th whatever your grade is on that day when it closes that's the grade you're going to get that's going to be averaged with the previous quarter to give you your semester grading if those two
051average to 65 or better then you get credit um if my child picks college prep but she's able to switch to honors because college prep is not challenging enough absolutely we allow schedule changes in the first two weeks of the semester for a half year course we allowed in the second semester too but the first two weeks in which you were in the class you're allowed to to change your schedule it could be you know i chose this elective and it's not for me it could be i chose the wrong level in one of my core classes but we can make schedule changes so long as as as they work and they fit given your current schedule our counselors will make our their best effort to make it work if you're in algebra one in
052eighth grade you immediately go to algebra two almost all the time but but not not every time so it's your choice the majority of students in middle school who who take algebra one take algebra two when they come to high school but we've had some that didn't feel ready for elsewhere two so they took algebra one again again you didn't get credits in middle school so uh you you can pretty much take what you want but the vast majority of the time however you know they ended in middle school they take the next class logically and math especially [Music] is it better to take college prep and honors for colleges i don't know i think it's important that you challenge yourself and you do the best you possibly can to whatever level you choose uh
053in colleges we'll see this student work works hard this student you know puts in a good effort in all the classes that they take and i think that's what colleges are looking for they're not looking for someone who's going to take college prep classes because they're easier or honors classes because they're harder they want someone that you know that's right at the right level and challenges themselves and is a well-rounded student how do i figure out who my child's counselor is excellent question you won't really find out until we release the schedules the way our freshman transition counselors work counselors are assigned to different teams so teams one two and four have missed zondeck teams five six and seven have miss harris and teams three and eight have uh miss rodriguez so you in power
054school will show who your counselor is but that's how we decide who your counselor is in ninth grade depending on which freshman academy team you're in so we need six credits as a freshman and we need 25 at the end of 12th grade yes nailed it do we need a full year of gym or is it split between two years uh typically we have a freshman take um one semester of pe their freshman year and then another semester sophomore year if you really wanted to you could double up freshman year but we do like um all sophomores to take pe too so that's the traditional thing that we do a half year freshman year and a half of your sophomore year for phys ed what happens if a selected course is not available which gets
055me back to you we request classes we don't necessarily register for them so if that course is not available for some reason maybe the way that registration works is we take all the requests then when we load students we load seniors first and then juniors and then sophomores and unfortunately freshmen last the reason we do that is because freshmen have three more years after that to get the courses they want and seniors probably need it this year in order to graduate so if a whole bunch of seniors really wanted american sign language and freshmen did too there's a good chance the freshmen may get bumped out of it because we run one section and the seniors fill it up before everyone else we did have some freshmen in this year so there's hope but again
056the upperclassmen we load them first the freshman after that um selected classes it shows 14 and two additional is that normal um i don't know what that means it could be in the online registration i'm not sure about that one but if you want to send me an email i can i can help you troubleshoot the online registration um because i better take college proper honors again whatever you want to do uh if you take algebra one in middle school does that transfer uh to math credits in high school no because you're gonna take algebra two then you're gonna take geometry then you're gonna go take some more advanced math classes um on your way to the math classes you need in order to graduate timber high so that's where one class you will not
057get credit you don't come to danbury high with credits from middle school uh will freshman be in the same classes as 11th and 12th graders usually no definitely not in a core class our freshman academy classes um english math science social studies all freshmen it's possible if you take an elective you could have an upperclassman in there absolutely probably not in pe or health but very possible if you took like an acting class or food nutrition it's very possible that you could have a class with an upperclassman as well um will the school have all in class students in the fall semester i sure hope so um i i can't answer that for sure but i think we're we're moving the right direction as you know we're we're increasing wednesdays our students are gonna be
058coming back so i think that's as part of the the process of moving back to a little more normalcy but my goal and my vision is that we'll be back in in school the way that we used to starting next fall and i hope that happens we have time for about two more questions um what's the ratio student ratio or what's the ratio of student to counselor our counselors have uh mid 200s 250 to 275 i believe is what they average between their teams in the freshman academy i'd love to have more counselors and dr salle's listening that would be awesome get more counselors if a requested class is not available should you be notified and have the option to select something else uh no but we do allow you to choose alternates so when
059you're registering for classes you'll choose the classes you want to take and then alternate electives say two or three things that you may want to go into if one of your classes is not available and powerschool is smart enough to say oh you know what that class isn't available go choose one from the electives bucket and we'll fill out your schedule if it doesn't work out there we still have time you can meet with counselors before school starts we have opportunities to make schedule changes and like i said in the first two weeks you can also meet with school counselors to get your schedule adjusted so every student we're confident we'll get the schedule you know that they want that fits by the time they show up here at danbury high okay i think that's
060all our questions and i think that's all our time 6 45 so you can move on to the rest of the agenda thank you all for your time tonight if there's a question i didn't answer or something i said that confused you i apologize please reach out i'll do my best to correct it and get you pointed in the right direction i'm really excited for everyone to to be here in the fall so go out there register for those classes enjoy the last few months of eighth grade and come ready to to be a part of the danbury high community and give back and be more than just a student that's my challenge to all of you so thank you appreciate