Year after year, a group of 80-90 seniors graduates from Parker, moving on to start new chapters of their lives–mostly in college–and beyond. Yet notwithstanding the considerable work of the college counseling department, there’s little in the school’s academic curriculum that has prepared seniors for the business of applying to college or the college experience itself.

Enter Gary Childrey, upper school counselor and health teacher at Parker, who–along with other faculty and students–has developed a new class for seniors that will focus on the college transition and on college-readiness.

It’s called the “Senior Seminar,” and it’s a course designed to help seniors engage, reflect, and transition in their final year at Parker. After developing the idea during the start of his current, yearlong sabbatical, near the end of last semester Childrey began talking with the senior class, sometimes by means of focus groups, and further refining the course by talking with colleagues such as Head of College Counseling Susan Weingartner and fellow US counselor and health teacher Binita Donohue.  The purpose of Childrey’s sabbatical was to broaden the current health curriculum from just a ninth grade experience.

“The senior seminar has been in the making for a long time,” Childrey said. “Joe Ruggiero, the previous Head of the Upper School, had an idea for a course for seniors to take that would help prepare them for college. I also worked at DePaul for ten years, and I taught a course in adolescent development and in it, a lot of the college students who took it said things like, ‘Oh, I wish I could’ve taken this in High School.’”

According to Donohue, the time was ripe.  “Our students are academically well-prepared,” Donohue said, “but I think it’s really great to talk and learn about college transition, and to have college readiness skills for things like self-management, handling relationships, and a variety of other social and emotional skills.”

According to the blurb in the 2017-8 Course Description Packet, “Using a seminar format, instructors proactively address the varying and unique needs and tasks that seniors face in the course of the year while introducing them to methods for lifelong social and emotional health.”

And that’s just a fraction of what the seminar will address. From complex, psychology-related topics dealing with self-care and emotional intelligence, to basic home economics like doing your own laundry, students will prepare for transitioning to life beyond high school while managing the various demands they will face in their final year at Parker.

“In ninth grade Health, we talk about how to handle stress, anxiety, how to handle healthy relationships, along with a variety of different topics like drugs and alcohol,” Childrey said. “But after that, there’s no other place or space where students will be able to talk about that—which is really a crime, because many of the issues you talk about in 9th Grade, you won’t deal with until you’re a Junior or Senior—so we also wanted to do something where seniors were given that opportunity.”

The pass/fail class will meet once a week for the whole year, and it’s most likely going to be in smaller classroom settings, with students’ given some freedom in the makeup of their class.

Junior Sebastian Saker, for one, is optimistic.  “When you go out to college, life really changes,” Saker said, “and I think there are a lot of key life lessons that we can learn that not all of the Parker community necessarily knows already, and so the seminar will hopefully help us prepare for life in college.”

The seminar nature of the course is what Donohue stressed.  “A seminar is a discussion-based experience,” Donohue said.  “It’s not just feeding students material, but it’s a mutual kind of thing—so informal conversations, opportunity to have students talk about what’s relevant for them, as they think about leaving from high school to college.”

Senior GJ Pryor thinks the addition is a sensible one. “I think it’s a good idea, especially because we haven’t had health since Freshmen year,” he said, “and I think that as we get older, we gain more freedom, and we forget a lot of the things we’re taught that would help us now more than ever.”

A group of juniors expressed discontent with the fact that Childrey hadn’t asked for their imput earlier, as they will be the ones “actually taking the course.” Above all, this group of students was concerned that they would be too busy to take on an additional academic period each week. Childrey took these comments into account at a graderoom and plans to discuss the seminar with the junior class near the end of April, when he hopes to better obtain their thoughts on the class and further develop a curriculum.

Meanwhile, after being approached by a number of seniors, Childrey is starting to talk to the senior class during their graderooms about transitioning to college, which gives him the opportunity to do a trial-run to better prepare the class for next year.