@burghdad what a cluster indeed! glad she’s feeling better.
@burghdad Glad your D is feeling better. I can’t believe the results took 9 days, that’s a really long time still.
S got a job at CFA, he is excited to get out the house.
We’re in Northern Virginia. All the camps have closed here too so parents are desperate for sitters. We were comfortable with S21 sitting as long as it was for just one family who is also working at home full time (as DH and I are). Only other job options are restaurants open for takeout or grocery stores and those seem a lot more high-risk, interacting with a lot more people. DH has been (IMO) really paranoid about contagion but even he was OK with the babysitting arrangement.
He put out his job ad on two neighborhood lists and had about a dozen requests in just a few hours. All from families with boys who would love a teen boy to play soccer and Pokemon with their boys for a few hours a day.
For traveling, we’re doing house rentals, both in VA about a 4-hr drive from home. We’ll wipe down surfaces when we get there and use our own linens. This is instead of flying to CA to visit my family as planned. Not comfortable flying yet, but we’re OK with driving trips.
@JESmom all sounds good! You are making the most of the options. 
Grrr, just lost the babysitting job. The child’s stepmother became available to watch him. Now he’s following up with some of the other families who had contacted him.
@jeneric D is planning full time dual enrollment at local flagship-will not know for sure if she is accepted until the end of June. She was planning this before covid-19, not because of it.
Anyone know how to handle question on college apps asking about senior year classes? She will be applying to some this summer and not have courses selected until later in the summer. Does she say unknown…or dual enrollment but not specific course title…or something else?
Another warning about DE classes besides the fact that they follow you. S18 took Chem DE, and the grading was different for the college version. He didn’t really pay attention to the college prospectus, which was different from the HS prospectus (much heavier emphasis on the final). He thought that unless he scored unrealistically high or low on the final, he would get a B, so it didn’t matter and he didn’t study at all for it. For the HS grade, that was true. But he didn’t realize that if he got a poor grade on the final it could bring his college grade from a B to a C, which it did. So the HS transcript says B, but the college transcript says C.
I think he has maybe a 3.8 or so in college without it, and the C is an annoyance that brings down his GPA. Doesn’t really matter much in the grand scheme, and he is really happy to NOT take Chem (and a couple other classes) in college. But when he first transfered to his current school, which is part of the same system as the one with the DE, his first semester he had a 2.0 GPA, which was annoying.
@dadof4kids That is good to know. GPA is one of the reasons I wanted D to wait until senior year to dual enroll. She also has all her required classes completed so it should make scheduling easier since she won’t need to worry about anything translating to hs courses-everything will count as electives for hs.
Got the official word from our district that they are not holding ACT. There are a few districts left that insist they will hold the June test. A friend talked to one such district yesterday and then called ACT and was able to switch her two teens to that location.
I called ACT this morning and was told I couldn’t switch and I had to wait for the forthcoming email before I could make any changes. I asked to speak to a supervisor who then told me that we would get an email this week that would let us know if our location had been cancelled, and if it was cancelled D would be changed to a location that remained open. I repeated back what she said and asked if I was understanding that correctly, she said yes. I asked if they really thought the remaining locations could accomodate all of the cancelled locations and she said yes. Honestly hoping she was telling the truth, but it just doesn’t seem likely. Very frustrated with how ACT is handling this. Have any of you received this email yet?
The way Dual Credit classes work in our school district is that there is only one grade…the one which is given by the community college class teacher. Our district partners with a local community college. Depending on the class, Students either physically go to the community college campus or the class is taught at the high school campus by the community college teacher 2 days a week (M/W or T/Th…the other three days of the week the students have an advisory period.). Our district weighs DC classes the same as AP classes…they both have a 1.3 multiplier. We have 2 nine week grading periods in a semester. For dual credit classes, a grade isn’t received until the end of the semester when the college class has ended. Our district does numerical grades, not A’s/B’s etc…so whatever the numerical grade on the college transcript is the same numerical grade on the high school transcript…that is then multiplied by 1.3 for weighted gpa that determines high school class rank.
@OriginalSmother I would not hold your breath. We went through this with D and SAT when her March test was cancelled but there were other schools not too far away that I believe had the test. She was not allowed to switch. In fact, the SAT test booklets had already been delivered to her school and were sitting in unopened boxes. I spoke to our head of counseling and she said it just wasn’t possible to get those tests divided up to different other locations and ensure those locations would have enough proctors. I’m betting the same happens with the June ACT. It will just be too late to get more space and more proctors and get the test booklets out for kids not originally signed up for any school still giving the test.
On top of that? I actually think all locations will be cancelled so it won’t even be worth fretting about it. If those locations haven’t send out info about social distancing and kids wearing masks to the test, I doubt it’s happening. A June test will be like any other and ACT and CB don’t seem to move too quickly on stuff like that. I do not believe the high schools hosting ACTs in two weeks will have everything set up to have hundreds of kids take that test. Imagine all of the changes? How to enter the building, How to check in. Giving instructions before the test on masks and social distancing. Getting the proctors educated.
I’m interested in knowing if the ACT June test is happening in states that are open…WI, IN, FL, TX, GA, etc.
@homerdog I absolutely agree with you. I don’t understand why ACT is unwilling to say they are cancelling. Just pull the plug already. Stringing families along like this is wrong.
And Florida - Universal Orlando is opening June 5. If a major theme park can open, I feel like they could hold an ACT
I don’t see an ACT happening in our district in TX, summer school is online and the schools are all still closed, except a few that provide lunch.
@OriginalSmother
We’re in the midst of the ACT frustration with you. And no, we haven’t received an email. And I really don’t think it will be held. I know they’re trying to use the latest information to possibly pull out a summer test since SAT has canceled. That said, there’s so much uncertainty for these students. It would really be nice to have clarity where it is possible.
We have decided even if the ACT in June is held our daughter is not taking it. She is applying to TO schools and unless she gets an athletic scholarship offer from a DI school, there is no need for her to sit in a room full of other kids for hours.
There is enough uncertainty for these kids, I’m not going to add to it with the ACT. She had a tutor, she studied, she’s registered. But taking it out of the equation.
Hi, everyone, I took @homerdog’s suggestion and ordered the book, “Write Your Way In, ” (sorry, no underlines on my iPad) and read it cover-to-cover yesterday. Lest you think I’m a total helicopter (well, OK, maybe I am?) I only meant to skim before handing it to my D. But it was just THAT good…couldn’t put it down and it made ME want to start writing. It’s a page-turner and actually pretty funny.
So I recommend it to anyone. I think it would take around 80 percent of the anxiety away from the college essay writing… shows step by step how to go about generating topics without stress and building/editing etc. Best of all, it shows specifically how to find the story underneath the story (the part that illuminates character, personality, etc) in a step-by-step way that still would not produce anything formulaic. The author used to be an admissions officer at Duke and is now a creative writing professor so she knows her stuff. I’m sure it will make the summer chore a lot less dreadful around here and might even be…a little bit fun?
Maybe it’s because I don’t have dog in this fight, but I have to side with ACT on this one. Their position (rightly) is they are willing to provide tests for anyone who can take it. It wouldn’t make business sense for them to cancel at this point when state reopening plans are changing weekly. If the site says they can’t host, they cancel. Until then, it’s considered going forward.
I’m in a similar boat with some vacation plans we have. We have a vacation rental booked on Sanibel Island in July for a family reunion. Up until middle of last week, vacation rentals were only allowed if they were 30 days or more. On Friday of last week, Florida said that vacation rentals of any time frame were allowed except from hard hit states. Illinois is one of them. So as of today, we still can’t go. But when I called the management company to see if we should cancel, they said they expect the restrictions to change again in two or three weeks. So either we can go, or we can’t go, but it would just be bad business for the condo owner to give us back our deposit at this point when there’s a possibility that they could keep it under our contract. I get that (though I won’t be making final payment until I know we can go). Sometimes you just have to wait and see what happens.
Sorry to hear about all the ACT woes!
I preemptively moved my S’s ACT to the July date in another district after learning our district would not host either summer offering. I wish ACT would inform on both test dates at the same time – are host sites really going to do something different in July than in June?
Do we know this about students needing to take the test in masks? I hadn’t seen that before.
It’s just not fair to kids who need to prep. My S is in total “I’m over it mode” and I’m having a hard time telling him he really needs to prep when I feel like it’s at best a 50/50 proposition that it’ll happen.