001good afternoon everyone i am mr davidson i am the principal of the freshman academy at danbury high school and thank you all for joining us today to talk a little bit about danbury high school i have a few people that i really want to introduce to you let me share my screen so that you can see them while i introduce them i have mrs ondeck with me school counselor at danbury high school i have miss harris another school counselor danbury high school oh sorry about that mr rodriguez is another one of our counselors she's out right now but miss isaac is filling in for her ms carlson is our director of school counseling and we have dr roy who is our early college opportunity director all right so let's get this show on the road
002i think i'm sharing my screen yes okay i think we're good so you guys are the class of 2025 which is pretty exciting it makes me feel old because each year i say the same thing and each year that number continues to get higher so welcome incoming class of 2025 to your 9th grade year at cambridge high what are we going to talk about today i want to talk about kind of um what is the freshman academy what's the registration process to get you know going freshman year what does that look like what supports we have available what extensions we have available for you dr roy is going to talk quickly about the tamarind early college opportunity which is our deco program and then kind of what's next going forward after you log off today
003throughout the presentation if you have questions you can take your phone and you can scan that qr code and you'll be able to get to the form to ask us a question at the end of the presentation i will go to my computer and i will read all the questions that you guys answered and hopefully answer any questions you may have i have a couple a couple questions that the other school has answered that hopefully you guys will touch on if not i'll circle back and answer those two but if you scan that with your phone it'll open up that that um qr code will open up the formula so you can answer that question so the freshman academy our freshman academy is our transition program into ninth grade we found that it's really hard
004to go from middle school to high school without something kind of in the middle and that's what our freshman academy is we have a team approach similar to what you have in middle school so your academic core teachers will meet to discuss you other kids in your team what they're doing as a team so that they can all stay on the same page and support you the best they can we have additional supports only offered to freshmen our teachers have common planning time we have eight teams in the freshman academy you're able to take college prep or honors courses and i'll explain what that means a little bit and our counselors are specially trained to help you through the transition process they understand what it takes to go from 8th grade to 9th grade and
005they understand what it takes to be successful going forward so they have special skills to help you out in that area we just opened up a brand new freshman academy which was pretty cool we had 26 classrooms new science labs gym locker room there's ac we call that our g building it's a really nice space the majority of freshmen will have three quarters of their classes in the new building and some will actually have all of their core classes in the new building but everyone is at least getting an experience over there in some capacity most of the core classes like i said will be in the new building and if you take electives those classes will probably not be in the new building unless you take a health class a couple of those are
006in there too so what do you need to know about danbury high school well it's a little different than middle school because we have a prescribed set of courses that you have to take in order to graduate everyone at tambury high school has to take four english credits three and a half social studies four math three science um you have to satisfy all of those areas in order to to move out of danbury high school and graduate you could have a averages across the board you can do awesome you could fill your schedule but if you don't take one of these things then you're not gonna you're not gonna graduate so if you miss a health credit you could have hundreds across the board and everything but you're not going to graduate because you didn't
007take health so you have to satisfy each one of these credits going through your four years of high school so you may say wow mr davidson i'm kind of scared don't worry we have counselors that are going to help you register for those classes to make sure that you have everything you need in order to graduate on time and the good thing about it is freshman year there's not a ton of decisions to make you will need to make some decisions whether you take honors classes or college prep level classes so whatever you choose in english you also have to choose in social studies which is our world studies course and whenever you choose in math you have to choose the same level in biology you can choose honors in english and social studies and
008college prep in math and science but those two inside of this little box i have here the the blue box lewis gray box and the orange box those have to be the same and that allows us to keep our our teams in place so that we have enough classes to offer each team and our and our teachers you know don't have crazy crazy numbers of kids in their classes um freshman year you also have if you need the support you're going to be taking a reading or a math lab course if you don't need that support that won't be in your schedule we recommend that all freshmen take health in phys ed and you have some electives that are available to you not all the electives in school but a lot of them everyone always
009asks what's the difference between honors and college prep well college prep what you learn is going to prepare you for college so we're going to teach you the skills and the content necessary to go on to college if you so choose to do so honors classes you're going to learn the same things but you're going to be asked to go deeper you're going to ask to do more and you're going to have a heavier workload oftentimes we ask you to do more outside of the classroom in our honors classes so that's something to think about talk to your teachers talk to your counselor talk to your parents and decide when you register if college prep classes or honors classes are the best place for you to start and one of the good things about tanbury
010high is we don't lock you into that for the rest of your career we don't even lock you into that for the rest of the year so during the first 10 days of the school year you can choose to change so if you're in a college prep class and you say i really want to challenge myself some more switch to an honors class and if you're an honors class you decide wow this is really a little too challenging for me you can make an adjustment and go to the college prep version of that class as well and whatever you take freshman year you don't have to stay in there for for sophomore junior senior year we let you choose whichever level you want to take you know given the information that you have so you're
011not locked into one track you don't have to take the same level all the way through through high school uh the electives you get to take we have them in just about every area anything you could be interested in i think we have a class for you at danbury high school some of them aren't open yet until you become an upperclassman but we have a ton open just for freshmen we have one ap course that's open um ap computer science principles when you take that course you learn about computer science and then as you move on you can you can go take more ap classes as you become a sophomore junior and senior but we have just about every elective available to freshmen as well so a sample schedule we have a block schedule at
012the end very high we have eight days we have b days and you'll see block one two and three those classes alternate from a day to b day but that fourth block stays the same so you'll see fourth block personal finance our fourth block meets every single day whether it's a day or b day it is shorter than the other ones um so we have you can take up to seven classes so blocks one two and three for eight and b days they're six plus that fourth block um which is that seventh class that you can take behind if you're curious about what courses we have to offer because i know i flashed them up on the screen really really quick go to our course of study guide it's right on our website under students
013course guide and you can choose one of our three different language versions of that course guide so you can read about different classes you might want to take so you're ready to request those classes now when the registration window opens you'll go into powerschool type your name in and you'll click on the little uh class registration button now the classes you choose are not necessarily the classes you're going to get in all cases so you may choose you know what i really want to take american sign language awesome it counts as a world language credit but maybe it's there's no room in that class maybe you'll have to wait till sophomore year to take that i guarantee whatever core classes you take english math science social studies will get you into i can't guarantee all
014the electives that you choose will be on your schedule when you get it in the summer but you'll go through and you'll pick whichever classes you want to take english social studies math science remembering to choose either honors honors or college prep for those classes once you select all those click ok i'm sure you've done this before so it looks kind of familiar you do the same thing with your electives and then we'll get all of those course requests and we'll build a schedule we'll say wow we need seven sections of engineering or we need 15 sections of guitar because everyone wants to take guitar and we'll build our schedule using the teachers we have and the requests that we get to hopefully satisfy as many of those requests as possible academic supports i think
015it's important to talk a little bit about what do you do if the transition to high school isn't as smooth as you thought it was going to be what if you struggle a little bit that's okay freshman year is so important to get you through that we have some additional supports embedded in there so that we can help you the first one is our read 180 class followed up with our math 18 class um those are intensive uh support classes to help you increase your skills in reading and mathematics if you need them we have flex time which i think is one of the coolest things about danbury high that we added a couple years ago flex time everyone on monday they go and decide what they want to do for the rest of the
016week during flex it may be you have a test coming up so you want to meet with that teacher to get an extra study time it may be you missed a class last week and you missed an assignment so you want to meet with the teacher and work on that assignment so you schedule them during flex time it could be you don't have anything to work on so you want to go down and do yoga in the new gym whatever it may be there's something for you in flex so flex time is really a time where where you can use it and utilize it for what you need whether it's supports whether it's extensions whether it's just a check in with a teacher but you dictate what you want to do during that flex time
017so students on monday will schedule what they're doing in flex for the rest of the week to to make sure that they're you know where they need to be academically and even with extensions as well we have directed study hall if regular study hall is not is not the best setting for you we have directed ones up with me in the lab before office and we have an after school tutoring program we have a twilight program if you don't do well in the first semester of a course we allow you to retake that course after school so that you can have the right number of credits to move on to sophomore year we have a credit recovery program you'll work through recovering credit card at your own pace and we have a pretty intensive srbi
018intervention process to help support students in all of the classes so what if you don't need any support you come to dairy high you're ready to go things come fairly easy for you well then i challenge you to to challenge yourself we have extensions available we have 26 ap courses that we that we offer 21 of our kids do take ap classes and those ap classes equal college credits in the future so if you transfer your grades from an ap course when you enroll in college oftentimes and most of the time colleges will give you college credits so you'll be three or four or five or six or however many you transfer closer to graduating college because you took classes in high school which is pretty cool um flex allows like i said for extensions
019or enrichment so if it's something that you're interested in that's outside of the curriculum and a teacher is offering a flex session in that area go ahead challenge yourself there um our deco opportunities is a great extension to to challenge yourself outside of the four core academic areas we have honor societies that students can join we have an accelerated summer course program if you wanted to take geometry over the summer you certainly could and we have opportunities to do that our concept upward bound program we have tons and tons of athletics clubs and at the end of the day i challenge students to become more than just students at danbury high school you don't have to join a club you don't have to be involved in in athletics but i think it's a great way
020to get as much as you can out of your high school experience so i challenge everybody don't just come here and be a student don't just come here and take classes be more than that get involved as much as you can a great way to to get the most out of your high school experience dr roy is going to talk a little bit about the early college opportunity dr roy hi everyone so the danbury early college opportunity is an experience of danbury high school where you are able to work on an associate degree in computer information sciences while you're working on your danbury high school requirements and so you're duly enrolled at naugatuck valley community college and danbury high school so you might think wow that's a lot it is a lot but we make
021it work by being able to offer you classes for the college right during the school day at the high school we can offer them after school we offer them during the summer um so it's really a great way to kind of push yourself and we have all kinds of students who apply for the deco program it's not necessarily you know you don't have to necessarily be somebody who gets straight a's all the time or anything we we do have a wide variety of students and we just offer a bunch of different supports to help people be successful it's a great way to earn college credits again while you're in high school or to see if college is going to be the right next step for you so for our freshmen um what you would need
022to do is right now actually starting march 8th you will be able to apply via a lottery so it's an online lottery system on the deca website we'll put it up on the danbury high school website as well we take we can take up to 60 students in the program and then what happens is for your freshman year we would have one of your elective spots taken up with a class called workplace learning and during that workplace learning class you're learning how to be a professional you're learning the soft skills we call them of business which is writing resumes and formal emails and letters and you can see here in this particular picture that mr davidson's showing these students are all receiving certificates from nagatok valley community college or an associate degree from naugatuck valley
023community college um in this case i think we we had different levels where the students were getting upwards of 30 or more college credits while they were at the high school so it's a really cool opportunity we have mentors that come in from a variety of different industries within danbury and they come in and they talk to students they do whole whole class presentations um we have ment we have matched kids up with one to one with mentors in the industry it really just depends on what you're looking for in a mentor and then we also have students go out and do internships with different industries in in danbury so it's a really cool experience the first thing we typically do and last summer we weren't able to do it because of covid but typically
024invites students to come into danbury high school three days during august to kind of get to know the building we do some team building we get to play some fun games follow your schedule those kinds of things just as a way to kind of ease the transition into high school so what you need to do is check out the danbury early college opportunity website and [Music] you can see different classes that you might want to take through the deco program apply via lottery and i will let you know um mid-march mid to end of march whether or not you were accepted into the program if you have any questions feel free to reach out and you can leave me a message or shoot me an email thanks guys thank you dr wright so what does
025that mean for you guys um going forward our registration schedule from here on out is we we've been to west side we've been to broadview and we've been to rogers park um from from here the next big thing is 3-1 that is our school fair that's an opportunity for you as freshmen to come and learn about all aspects of danbury high school maybe not just me uh here talking to you about being a freshman but learning about clubs learning about sports learning about the different organizations all the things that are offered at danbury high and and right when that's over we'll open the registration window for you to start picking classes or requesting classes so we can build your schedule in the fall um we'll talk to the private school students coming in at 3
02615 and that registration window is is open almost to the end of march right around when when dr roy will get back to you about about the deco program so the first one's done if you have questions and you probably will and and i don't answer them today or you forget to ask them today reach out to us these emails and phone numbers are all on our website you can ask your counselor for help and they can get you in contact with us um but but reach out don't don't leave an answer because you think ah it's not important or or that you know it's a silly question whatever maybe ask us i want you to feel as comfortable as possible coming to denver high all right so you guys have actually done an awesome
027job asking questions more than any other middle school so nice job um so i'm going to jump to some questions the first one we have uh what kind of specials do you have we don't really have specials we have what are called electives so you can take an elective in all those areas i showed you business family consumer science art music um all those different areas our electives are kind of like specials but we don't make you take you know not everyone has to take gym and health and all those things that you may music whatever you may have taken to middle school or elementary school as a special we let you choose yours or request the electives you want in your schedule the next question should i be nervous absolutely not um i think
028you should be excited it's a really good opportunity to come here and see what danbury high is all about and our kids do some fantastic things and i imagine you guys are going to be the next group of kids that do fantastic things so don't be nervous be excited um do you have to join a club in high school no you definitely don't you can be as involved or not involved as you want but i feel you're going to get more out of the experience the more involved you are what sports can freshmen into their first year we have a freshman version of just about every sport at every high so football baseball basketball cheerleading lacrosse field hockey they all have freshman versions of those teams so you have an opportunity to compete against other
029freshmen from other schools and interact with other freshmen at tambury high school if the skill level is not appropriate maybe you should be playing varsity i assure your coach will move you up and you'll get to play a little bit of varsity time as well but we have sports in just about every area available to students that come in next up what classes will i get to take and pick awesome awesome question um you'll be able to take your four core classes that you that you request english math science social studies i promise you i'll get you those um the electives the way it works is all students at danbury high request the class or the classes they want to take and then when we build the schedule we look at what the seniors want
030we fill them into the classes and then we look at what the juniors want and the sophomores and then we look at the freshmen so it's not guaranteed that you'll get the classes that you want but we usually do a pretty good job of getting classes that people want to be in to fit into their schedule so you'll see once we make that all work we'll send out schedules usually in early august and you'll see you know what classes you're going to take it may not show you which block you have them but it'll show you which classes you requested and you're registered for what's next is it going to be a lot different from what we do now yes and no i think it's it's it's going to be different in its high school
031now so we expect more out of our students but you're still going to be a part of the danbury public schools community so it's going to be the same in that capacity we do ask you to do things differently which is okay and we do ask you just to you know do more as you as you grow up and become more responsible but i don't think it's going to be like mind-blowingly different than what you have in middle school probably one of the biggest differences is if you're in middle school and you don't do well in your math class in seventh grade you're still gonna go to eighth grade most of the time um at denver high it's not it's not like that so if you don't pass algebra one or algebra two or whatever
032math class you're in you're taking that class again next year so if you don't pass algebra one you don't get to go take algebra two because you didn't pass algebra one you'll have to take that again next year so it's really really important that you work hard and pass all those classes that you can graduate on time um what is the school's dress code oh we ask you to dress appropriately uh i don't need to see you know your midsection and in short shorts and things like that um we do have some rules that's all found in our handbook so you can take a look at that to be ready to come here in the appropriate attire is there a hockey team you can play on absolutely a hockey team we have a co-op with
033brookfield and bethel and and we do pretty well in that league can i take honors one year in college prep another year awesome question yes you can whatever you take this year doesn't doesn't mean you have to take the same thing next year so if you take honors classes all four core classes this year next year you could take all four college prep whatever you decide is the most appropriate thing for you and like i said before talk to your counselors talk to your parents get a good idea as to what you should be doing you know don't just jump into it without doing your homework is college prep easier to start in freshman year or junior year i can't answer that one it's really not any easier to start any time choosing the right
034one for you is really the most important part of that so if you feel you're up to the challenge of honors classes then try honors classes if you don't feel you're up to that challenge then take college prep classes and like i said we can change in the first 10 days of school to make sure it's an appropriate fit um lots of questions here when our class registration is going to open we open that on 3-1 and it's open through most of march how many electives can you take well you can take electives kind of as many as you want so long as it fits into your schedule but freshman year you have to take those four core classes english math science social studies and we ask you to take pe in health so you
035really only have room for for one or two electives freshman year but as you take more classes and become a senior you'll have a lot more room for electives dr roy someone asked what is computer information technology you want to chime in for that one sure uh basically you're just learning different aspects of computers so it could be we offer classes in cyber security we offer classes in programming we offer classes in project management in database design in i said networking all kinds of different aspects of computers so um computer information technology it all kind of that's the big umbrella that all of those classes would fall under thank you next question do you have guitar classes yes we do we actually have a modern rock band class and we have acoustic guitar classes um
036if you're interested in that i need to learn how to play the guitar better so maybe i should take one of those classes next class do honors classes get college credit um most of the time now we do have a couple dual enrollment classes that are not ap classes that get credit for college but just because you're taking an honors class does not necessarily mean that you're going to get college credit some do a very limited one do do clubs give credit no clubs don't give credit they're just help you expand yourself and be more part of the school school community will we have the same counselors all four years in high school excellent question no you will have your freshman counselor and those freshman counselors are divided up by team so if you're on
037team one everyone on team one is the same counselor you're on team five everyone has the same concern on team five once you leave freshman year you go to a different council so you only have a freshman counselor when you're a freshman and then you get your new counselor sophomore year for sophomore junior and soon what time does school end in a non-pandemic year we get out at two o'clock how many credits do you need for college you need 25 credits to graduate danbury high school to go to college if you want to um i'm not going to answer that one do you have to take a world language course yes you do what about transportation um yeah we'll send a bus to your house what if you get lost good question you probably will
038get lost that's okay everyone gets lost the first couple times in january high school if you get lost ask for help someone will get to the right spot i promise you there's no pool and there's no d5 those two things do not exist so if someone tells you go up to d5 and go past the pool they're just messing with you one thing regarding transportation too mr davidson is uh wednesdays and thursdays we have late buses typically we do typically we have a late bus anybody who stays for our after school program for twilight for some of the clubs involved in the after school program and for tutoring we have a bus that will bring you home so that you know you don't have to walk home or your parents don't have to leave work
039early to come get you so that's a really good opportunity to get that extra time and to do something be it extra help um be a twilight program be it tutoring or or involvement with clubs um national honor society question mark yes we have one there are great requirements that you have to meet in order to in order to get into the honor society and you'll have to apply for it but definitely a cool opportunity what languages are available so languages available to take courses um satisfy world language requirements are spanish french italian and american sign language in chinese oh in chinese those are the courses that we have that will satisfy your old language requirement you can take multiple years there you don't have to stop after just one a lot of colleges love
040to see two or three years in the same language we also have spanish for heritage speakers for students who have a spanish-speaking background at home right on thank you dr ryan um world language classes another question about that when do we wake up and go home well our school hours are 7 20 to 2 o'clock i hope you'd get up a little before 7 20 so you can get here on time and don't leave early because 2 o'clock is when we're done all right i got time for one two more questions um can i take honors one year and cosplay another answer that one do you have an av club um we we do we yes yeah we absolutely do that's something you can talk to mr miller about he's a really good person to
041talk to in that area and are classes weighted differently yes they are so ap honors college prep they all impact your your grade point average and your gpa differently so when we do that calculation you get more weight for for an honors class or an ap class than you would for a college prep class but the the goal is to do as well as you can in the most challenging class you can to impact your gpas and all that information is in the student handbook which is available on our website for you guys yeah so any of the questions i didn't answer go take a look at that student handbook and go take a look at the course of study guide and if you can't find your answer in there ask your school counselor or
042email one of us and we'll be glad to answer okay so i think i took up all of my time thank you guys for the wonderful questions um and i look forward to seeing you on 3-1 at our school fair thanks