Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, August 27, 1994 TAG: 9408290048
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MELISSA DEVAUGHN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: CHRISTIANSBURG LENGTH: Long
"Are you nervous about high school?" Pauli asked, sitting on the living room couch across from the young man.
"Slightly," Charlie said, fidgeting a little in his chair.
"Well, first let me tell you - there is no hazing," Pauli said. "None at all. Now, you might get some senior who tells you to take his tray up at lunch time, but you just look at him and say 'no.'"
The soft-spoken, brown-haired freshman-to-be is one of 230 Christiansburg High School students who received personal visits this summer from a teacher, counselor or principal. It is all part of the new Home Orientation-Visitation Program, designed to make the transition from middle school to high school easier for the students.
"We want to give Charlie a face to go with a name," said Pauli, who visited Charlie; his mother, Diane Rakes; and his stepfather, Dennis Rakes, this week at the family's home. "If Charlie has any questions, he can come ask me, and if I don't know how to answer them, I can send him to someone who does," he told them.
For Charlie, that is a comforting thought. Although the 15-year-old athlete is on the junior varsity football team, and has a brother, Robbie, already at the school, Charlie is glad to meet someone who will acknowledge him on the first day of school.
"At least I can ask [Pauli] if I have questions," Charlie said. "I probably will, too."
Entering high school is a scary prospect for most freshmen; their concerns range from being picked on by seniors to walking into the wrong classroom only to be humiliated.
"I also wondered about exams and what kind of grades you can get to be exempt," said 14-year-old Kelli Edmonds, who was visited by a guidance counselor earlier in the summer.
Carrie Diehl, also 14, who received a visit at the end of July, said she was concerned "mostly about the amount of work I'd be doing and how hard it would be."
These concerns are the reason a group of 16 teachers, three administrators and four guidance counselors felt it needed to do something to make freshmen feel less apprehensive about entering high school.
"Statistics say if you lose kids [to dropping out], you lose them somewhere in that ninth-grade year," said Assistant Principal Buddy Shull, who also is coordinator for the program. "We're trying to do all we can to make it easier on these kids and to let their parents know we care."
The dropout rate for Christiansburg High School students in 1992-1993 was 5.9 percent - 2.5 percentage points higher than the state average.
Principal Dale Spaulding of Lampeter-Strasburg High School in Lampeter, Pa., where the idea for the Home Orientation-Visitation Program came from, isn't sure whether dropout rates have decreased among ninth-graders there since the orientation program began five years ago. He is sure, however, that it improves relations between the new students and their teachers.
"After the visits, we have a connection with them," Spaulding said of the 210 freshmen there. "Our primary intention is to let them know we care about them. ... It's only natural that [lower dropout rates] would follow."
So far, there are no other schools in Southwest Virginia with a program like Christiansburg's, although for years, Denise Boyle, the principal at Elliston-Lafayette Elementary School in Montgomery County, has visited every incoming kindergartner. Salem High School has initiated a freshman transition program in which students are matched with "buddy" seniors, but no visits have been made to the students' homes.
Principal George Porterfield said the visitation program has been successful because it has cost nearly nothing to implement - teachers and guidance counselors who participate get a small reimbursement - and it has made a lasting impression on parents.
Teachers began visiting students in July and by the end of the month, parents whose children had not yet been visited were calling the school, asking "when are you coming to our house?"
"It was a very informative meeting, and I was highly impressed to see such an interest in my child," said Charlie's mother, Diane Rakes, of the visitation program. "I'm finding out that the educational system is not just a job for teachers, but that they really care about students. This gives us a sort of peace of mind for [Charlie] and for our youngest son, Chris, when he goes [to Christiansburg High School], because we know the school cares."
Dennis Rakes said he enjoys "seeing the school come to us, rather than us always having to come to the school."
The Home Orientation-Visitation Program is not the only method teachers have developed for welcoming the freshmen. Parents received invitations in the mail to the yearly freshman orientation at the school, but teachers also followed up with a phone call to all parents to invite them personally to the orientation. The turnout at this year's freshman orientation was the highest it has ever been at the school.
Also, freshmen will be divided into groups of 10 and assigned to a teacher as part of an adviser-advisee program. The groups will meet twice a month to discuss anything from homework and grades to peer pressure and family matters.
by CNB