Unfortunately the Cal Arts campus was recently purchased by Vanderbilt and will be closing at the end of the 26-27 academic year.
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I think that’s a different school. Similar name, though! I linked California Institute of the Arts (in Santa Clarita), affectionately known as CalArts, which is distinct from California College of the Arts. Thanks for making me clarify!
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Our school counselor sent me an authorization form to release the Kid’s information to the University of California because he has been identified as being in the “top tier” of his class. The student information is used to support the UC’s ELC (Eligibility in the Local Context) program. I went to a counseling meeting a while back and learned that the school sends the names of the top 15% of the class to the UC as part of this process. The Kid has decided that he wants to leave California and experience a different part of the country. I did authorize release of his info to the UCs, in case he changes his mind and does want to stay in California.
There was some discussion on the Class of 2026 parent board about some high schools allowing kids to miss school to visit colleges. Our school treats college visits as unexcused absences. I expect we will be flying across the country during spring break of 2027 to see schools after decisions come in.
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Same at my 25s school. My 27s is private, and they are more chill about everything, for classes at HS, they need to make up work and arrange with teachers, but for their DE classes, the profs are very case-dependent. But missing classes is missing a lot of content (they only meet 3 days a week. My kid wouldn’t do it unless it’s really important. I always wonder how so many kids out there think nothing of missing a bunch of days for visits and sports 
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I am always so intrigued to hear all about CA systems! We don’t have anything like this, though our state is very focused on equity. Then again, it is so much smaller the AOs at the state schools, probably don’t need the forms? They can just know local context, practically offhand. One fun thing about these boards is a constant reminder of how diverse the US is.
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Same for my 25 when it came to visits as unexcused absences. Or I should say, they would allow two days per year for official visits (for example, for athletic recruits), but just to go on tours? Not so much. 27s school I think would probably consider college visits as unexcused as well, since there’s theoretically plenty of time during the various vacations, not to mention online info sessions etc., for them to do the research.
On the visit front, we finally settled on a fairly packed, three-day adventure across NY during his spring break. It’s a decent hodge-podge of schools, I think, and I am trying not to inject my own biases into the trip. It’s so hard not to look at the map and think, gosh, maybe we could squeeze this or that school as well, but I think we’re already seeing enough and honestly, the ones I am curious about are really reachy schools for him so it’s probably not worth trying to add them and thereby add another day of travel. It will all just become one big blur if we do that. I do think he should consider doing their online sessions. If he’s really into them, we can always go back to NY, I guess. We’re most likely going to do a targeted New England adventure in June, before summer really gets underway and it’s impossible to get anyone to want to go anywhere since it’s usually pretty lovely right here.
Course selection is coming along. He has some big decisions to make on that front when it comes to course rigor vs his interests - to take APs or to take advanced electives, and what the balance will be between the two. With his personality, I’m inclined to support his choice to lean into his interests, but it’s hard for me to come to terms with whether there will be “adequate” rigor with that path. He really is such a different student than his older brother who was all about taking the hardest classes possible. I think I will reach out to his counselor to hear her take on this.
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That is bonkers - why should athletes get different rules? I would have been fighting that tooth and nail, honestly. I have zero patience for that sort of thing. School is for academics.
Course selection for senior year opens today, and I find myself in a quandary about how to advise D27.
Over the last month, she’s moved firmly toward wanting a BFA in animation (as opposed to a broader liberal arts experience). She wants to skip either a science or a math next year, and if she had her way it’d be science she skips while she takes AP stats. I’m struggling with whether to try to make her take physics instead (we’ve already agreed she won’t take both, so that she has room for the arts classes she’s passionate about).
By the end of this year, she’ll have completed AP Calc a/b, and will have taken honors Bio and Chem, and APES. The only physics offered at our school is AP, and D27 really, really doesn’t want to take it. Her math grades have been her worst since middle school (the low point was a C in AP Pre-Calc, though she got a 5 on the exam) and in her mind, Physics is really just more math. She actively doesn’t want to take it.
And frankly, the only reason I’m a little bit tempted to make her is for college admissions. If she decides that she wants a liberal arts school, I feel like not having physics will hurt her chances of admission. For schools where admission is more portfolio-based I’m less worried, but I want her to have options because who knows how she’s going to feel in a year?
In case it matters, her gpa right now is 4.25w/3.75uw, and by the time she graduates she’ll have taken 10 AP classes. Physics would be the only hole in her academic resume (though she also only took through Spanish 3, which isn’t entirely ideal)
WWYD? She has not met with an advisor yet, and based on my experience with C29, I’m guessing the advisor would encourage her not to push herself.
I’d think a basic understanding of physics would probably be quite useful for animation? Similar to how anatomy would be useful for drawing to understand the underlying muscles and such, physics determines how things and bodies move through space based on their size, mass, etc… Stats would probably be less useful for animation but more useful for ordinary life.
A family member started as an animator for Warner Bros in the 1990s (Animaniacs) and has since transitioned to computer based animation.
They have had to learn many new skills since the beginning of their career to remain marketable. Over the years they were on the forefront of motion capture tech to link facial expressions and body movement to video game animation, and are now learning AI programming to remain employed.
I think physics would make her more marketable for colleges and then help her develop some skills that may help with future tech based applications for animation.
If the high school offers computer science, Engg design or Architecture, these could be good electives. AP Stat is highly specific.
Winter break trip was a huge success! D27 knocked one school entirely off the list, put a likely school high on the list, and she now has a front runner… with a tiny acceptance rate, of course. We learned a lot on the trip: two tours in one day is way more tiring than we expected, many info sessions just cover what you can find on a website, and we got a lot of clarity on what’s important to her in a college. She has been wary of campuses that feel too much like a “bubble” and on this trip, she didn’t vibe with the schools where it felt like the students did most of their socializing on campus. It was less of a defined campus vs urban campus issue (she liked one of each) and more about how the students interacted with the city surrounding the campus. She also realized that the ease of double majoring is really important to her; she’s currently undecided but has wide ranging interests and expects that she’ll combine a couple of areas of study. She’ll need a college that doesn’t lock kids into a major or a narrowly defined “school” in the application and she appreciated the schools that didn’t make undecided sound like a character flaw!
Plans are underway for a spring break trip and I think that’ll be it for us and tours. She gets a lot more out of visiting schools when classes are in session so she has no interest in touring over the summer. Hope everyone’s tours and senior class selection went well!
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DC completed first college visit this week. He’s not one for overt displays of enthusiasm but said “I liked it, I could see myself going there”.
He also told me that his social studies selection for senior year isn’t happening due to lack of enough student interest. So instead of AP Euro History, he’s going to be taking AP Psych. I don’t know what to think about that. Obviously he can’t take a class which isn’t offered but I have a bias toward history over psychology for HS students. I am also not sure how this choice will be viewed by colleges since it is listed as an AP course offered by the school on the school fact sheet they send to colleges. I know AP Psych has a rep for being an easier class but also he made his other choices, such as not taking AP Lit, based on the idea of taking AP Euro.
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The school should be updating the school profile each year over the summer, not a huge deal. You could even politely remind them to do so? I agree with you on history over psych, but it sounds like a done deal.
My kid has a plan for senior year classes, but doesn’t actually sign up until April!
I wonder if this would be something to mention on the “extra information” part of the common app, if the school’s profile doesn’t get updated? Just stated matter-of-factly: this academic year, my school did not offer AP Euro.
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Agree with this. Our public HS never updates the school profile, even though many of the 30+ AP courses listed there are not routinely offered (and some are never offered). Our kids have to provide a brag sheet so the counselors have something to put in their recommendations, and on there we always ask the counselor to mention if a certain class the student wanted to take was not offered - this year it was AP Chem.
But I wouldn’t hesitate to briefly mention the situation in Additional Information as well, especially if it had a meaningful impact on the student’s schedule. D26 did that for AP French this year; it shows to be offered as a class on the profile, but in reality it’s an independent study for the rare student who signs up, and D26 realized after talking with the one student who “took” the class in a prior year that it wouldn’t be productive. So she briefly explained in Addtl Info that she didn’t feel our version of AP French would help build her skills and that she chose another course instead. I don’t know what her results would’ve been over a broad sample, but it did not keep her from being admitted to a selective school in ED.
S27 is also in the middle of picking his senior year courses. He is at an Independent school and they are quite strict in terms of AP placement. Students must have received at least an A- in the honors level course for the subject the prior year, must have a teacher recommendation for that subject, AND do well on the diagnostic test for that course (though not all APs have a diagnostic). Students do not typically take AP courses prior to junior year and it is rare that students take more than 2 APs at a time.
It’s wild to me how different every high school is!
It looks like S27 will be taking:
AP Gov
AP Envi Sci
Honors Eng 12
Honors Ethical Philosophy
Accelerated Calc
He is a humanities kid and is considering a history/gov/leadership related major. He is in Spanish 4 this year, and I can’t convince him to take Spanish 5, so he is going to replace that with a history elective of some kind.
We are headed out on a short college tour in a few weeks. He is my third kid and has tagged along on tours with his older siblings (has also spent time at their colleges). He is pretty sure he wants a mid-size school with a contained campus. He was not a fan of any of the large publics that we have visited.
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It is good to hear updates from everyone. S27 has been dropping some academic balls lately. The combination of the high level music activities and athletics which was OK in previous semesters, seems like it is a bit too much this spring with all the AP courses that he is taking (plus the added pressure of keeping up with coach inquiries on the athletic recruiting side of things). I suspect things are only going to ramp up more this spring with the start of track and some special athletic travel that is going to require him to miss several days of class. He might still salvage things, but he’s got a bigger hole to dig out of than in the past. Anyone else have experience with kids reaching the edge of what they can handle junior year? I think he had a pretty good idea of what he could “get away with” academically in the past and that just isn’t working for him anymore.
That seems like a lot of steps process!
That said, I am a big fan of limiting the #s of hard glasses to keep kids with a reasonable workloads..
My 25’s public school didn’t really allow APs before 11th (a couple of very slight exceptions) - and only 2 jr year and no more than 3 senior - however, there was zero gatekeeping. Anyone could sign up for anything, including honors, AP, etc (with excpetion of pre-reqs - you couldn’t take Calc before pre-calc:) They didn’t want bias in processes, as they find in research - I am told - URM end up in fewer honors/APs when recommendations are needed…though that may be mitigated if there are 3 processes?
27s is a whole different system with no APs, and kids can sign for what they want, though they are given guidance 1:1…And they ALL have super hard workloads, literally all hard classes, so it is more a matter of balancing semesters and ensuring reasonable choices for admissions purposes…
Yes, it IS a lot of steps. You can’t even register for honors level courses without a teacher recommendation (and no honors courses are allowed before Sophomore year, except for the rare occasion). Kids do come in at various levels for math and language, depending on middle school courses.
I appreciate that the school emphasizes the kids taking rigor in the subjects that interest them and that they can do reasonably well in. They want the students to push themselves, but to also have a life outside of academics. I honestly don’t understand how kids can balance 4 or 5 APs at a time and still play sports or music, or a job, etc.
My son was not recommended for APUSH junior year because he didn’t do particularly well on the diagnostic test, even though he had an A in honors level history as a Sophomore. He was very offended and marched himself right into the Academic Dean’s office to file an appeal. He then had to meet with the department head and state his case. They finally allowed him to register for APush, and while it is definitely a tough class, he currently has an A-.
For senior year he has the green light to register for anything he wants, but they still don’t recommend that any student takes more than 2 or 3 APs.
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My 27 kid and I have had some discussions about next year classes. As a homeschooler, this is easy in some ways and hard in some ways. The easy part is that the only restrictions are her final couple graduation requirements (an English credit and a half credit state history). The hard part is figuring out what to do and what resources to use for the rest of it. She’s a science/math/cs person, and is beyond AP level in all of those, so I’ve definitely been hunting the internet for resources for self-directed classes, wondering what will be offered in the relatively small set of post-AP online live science college courses we’ve found (which aren’t cheap), and gaming out what she is least likely to need to repeat in college, without knowing where she’s going. Current plan is to try and find 2 college classes in the post-AP bio set, maybe Biochem and Evolution or Cell Bio and Bioinformatics, or something similar. Then some MIT opencourseware self-study, probably their physics 3 which should nicely follow the AP physics C she did, maybe another bio elective or another physics, and a couple of math classes (discrete math, and possibly linear algebra – but she’s worried about needing to take linear algebra twice, so she might try and find another math elective and save it for college). She can do a project-based CS credit, which she does every year. Then the English, maybe focusing on scientific writing and rhetoric, state history, and something else to fill the non-state history semester which I’ve told her to pick something that seems both interesting and easy, since otherwise it seems like all the classes will be very hard and problem set heavy, even if most will be flexible. Kid technically is in a public school, but for practical purposes it just provides a transcript, some funding, AP tests, and the district graduation requirements.
Kid is heading to Boston area with my husband and D28 to tour colleges at the end of the month, though more of the visits are actually geared for the sophomore, since D27s criteria are so specific it’s hard to find much to put on her list. But she’ll get to visit WPI, and I hope she loves it, since on paper it’s her second favorite after MIT and I’ll feel way better if she has a school with a reasonable acceptance rate she actually likes.
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