East Aurora High School setting students on the right path

By Jillian LeBlanc 

East Aurora High School continues to send 90 percent of its graduating student body to college. Despite the increasing student loan debt and vocational trainings available, this first ranked Western New York school district challenges students to continue their education.

Alka Moudgil, an English teacher at East Aurora High School, aims to prepare students for a world beyond basic schooling. Teaching juniors and seniors, Moudgil primes her classes to think about the future, whether it involves college, vocational training, or military work.

Until junior year, students live rigid schedules, with few choices. Then they are forced to think outside of the high school walls.

“I spend a good part of the first 10 weeks speaking about options,” Moudgil said. “And they’re ready for that point. 11^th grade, they’re somewhat ready, I insert conversations about this into my 11^th grade class, and I’ll talk to them about maybe roommate situations, or I’ll talk to them about what it looks like to take notes in a college class. I will put anecdotes in about my experiences, and I try to keep it really light and funny, so that they latch onto it. So when I go to talk about it in their senior year, they remember it, and relate to it.”

Classes become less about textbook content, and more focused on relating class examples to the real world. The content and assignments are intended to assist students for their next step, to allow them to recognize that they have choices to make.

“I’d much rather teach upperclassmen only because they’ve got a focus on the outside,” Moudgil said. “They know there is a world that they are going to face soon, so the conversations I can have with them are much more focused. So we’re reading this literature, but what does this really look like in the real world.”

Moudgil believes that affluent communities like East Aurora put more stress upon their students, forcing them to graduate and go straight to college. This is believed to be the best option, with the most rewarding payout in the future.

“In a place like this, everyone is told that they have to go to college. It’s an upper crust mentality, that you ‘must’ get this education,” she said.

In a wealthy community, Moudgil said, students are looked down upon for not following the crowd. Students then see themselves as failures if they don’t fit that mold, and drop out of college because it isn’t right for them. These days’ people believe that college is the only answer if someone desires a successful future.

Students are thus encouraged to graduate with an Advanced Regents Diploma instead of a regular Regents Diploma. This distinction is made to ensure that students are prepared for their college careers.

“The Advanced Regents Diploma is more rigorous,” East Aurora High School Principal James Hoagland said. “You have to pass eight, maybe nine Regents exams, where with the Regents, you only have to pass five. In order to pass those exams, you have to pass higher-level courses in the core area, which makes you better prepared for college. So the advanced Regents Diploma is a better college prep diploma than the Regents Diploma.”

Hoagland said that with the completion of an Advanced Regents Diploma, students should feel more comfortable academically in the years to come.

“In 2014, 78 percent of students graduated with an Advanced Regents Diploma, and in 2015, 68 percent. The average is two out of every three,” he said.

East Aurora High School leaders believe students with Advanced Regents Diplomas will flourish in college because of the challenges they’ve already faced.

While administrators encourage students to go to college, Moudgil gives students information and choices they don’t hear from the administration. She tells them there are no right or wrong options, simply decisions that may be better or worse for certain people.

“I always give two articles on what else is there besides college,” she said, “and why should your money go to a place that you really don’t want it to? Is the investment, is the payout what you want? Is that really what you want to do, or do you want to do something else? To have those conversations, and have them thinking about that process in a 12^th grade situation, I think is very important.”

Moudgil said she believes students aren’t given enough options, forcing them to go to college because they feel it’s their only choice.

(Because this is a messy quote and you’re going back to the principal, I’d encourage you to paraphrase like below instead of fixing it like I did one graph farther down)

Hoagland said 70 percent of East Aurora graduates from last year went to four-year schools, and another 24 percent enrolled in two-year schools. Three percent joined the military, and 8 percent went directly into the to world of work.

  

Few students decided to deviate from the college path. The school does not keep records on the number of students who drop out of college.

U.S. News and World Report discovered that one in three first-year college students do not return for their sophomore year. Moudgil believes that if the school were to encourage alternatives, rather than college, that statistic would be far lower.

“Some of the things I talk about in class, the kids have not heard about yet” she said. “I think transfer situations should be talked about more, because no decision that you make is a bad decision, it’s what you make of it. If you’re not happy with a decision that you’ve made, it just means that it’s not right for you right now, and you can change it.”

Ultimately, Hoagland said, if the academics and advisements have not prepared students for their next step, the senior commons class will.

“The commons class for seniors is crucial,” he said. “It’s where we don’t say that you have to study, you can sit and talk, you can listen to your headset, you can play your video games. What we say to them is, ‘The reason we’re not chasing after you to make sure you’re doing the work, like we used to do in study hall, is because so many students are going to go to college and nobody will care if you don’t do the work.’ It’s a rude awakening for some kids.”

East Aurora High School provides the knowledge, and assistance for students to do well outside of high school, but the decision ultimately falls on the shoulders of each student. While teachers including Moudgil seek to provide kids with alternative routes, each student will have to decide what is right for them.

“It has to be an intrinsic desire to do this,” Moudgil said. “If they’re going because someone else is going there, or their parents want them to get this degree, they’re much more likely to fail. They really have to be internally motivated. Whatever that motivation looks like, it doesn’t have to be the one that writes everything down, or must answer every question, or must do all the reading, but it has to come from some personal self-motivation that they want to be there.”

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