Cara Latham Staff Writer
Cara LathamStaff Writer
WASHINGTON As 151 members of Robbinsville High School’s first senior class walk through the school’s doors this week, they have a lot on their shoulders. When they leave through those same doors at the end of the school year, they will have formed the beginning pieces of the school’s legacy.
For a school that has not yet been able to boast statistics on the amount of scholarship aid its previous graduating class garnered, or even the variety of colleges its students attended, school officials are well aware of their duty to foster this legacy.
And they say they are very excited and confident that the first graduating class ever to receive a diploma from Robbinsville High School and not Lawrence High School, where district students were sent before the new high school opened to freshman and sophomores in 2005 won’t let them down.
”It only happens one time,” Robbinsville High School Principal Molly Avery said last week. “We only get one chance to do it the first time. Being the first graduating class is a pretty big deal, and it’s something people are going to look back on.”
With the first graduating class also comes the first prom, full varsity sports teams and clubs, and the beginning of traditions, Ms. Avery said. It also comes with the first college application process.
But with the first early-decision college application sent out by the school’s guidance department over the summer to Wake Forest University in North Carolina, school officials have worked feverishly to prepare everything necessary to ensure its seniors as well as the rest of its students get the best education possible.
As the first round of grade levels progressively moved through the new high school, officials added more courses. This year, there are a total of 40 new courses which include a new total of 13 Advanced Placement courses in sciences, languages and English, and also in Java and music theory.
For students interested in other areas, new courses also include comparative world studies, economics, Shakespeare, sports medicine and American history through sports.”It’s a cultural perspective for history how different things that we do for pastimes and different sports emerge and why certain sports become popular at certain times through history,” Assistant Superintendent Kathie Foster said of that last offering.
For engineering students, a new robotics class will be offered, and ‘earth sciences, anatomy and physiology’ also is new this year, she said.
””“”There also will be two sections of Chinese offered to students this year.
”One of the skills really necessary to be a citizen is really understanding a global perspective,” Dr. Foster said. “Students are really becoming more and more interested globally in Asia, obviously for the global economy as well as citizenship.”
With the first senior class on its way into the real world, school officials for the first time will have to deal with the college application process.
Laurie Rotondo, a new guidance counselor who worked for nine years as the director of admissions at Rider University, said the guidance office has been working all summer on creating forms and the profile of the high school to accompany transcripts when sent to colleges. The profile includes the background on the school regarding course offerings and average SAT scores.
”The colleges really rely on (the profiles) to understand what kind of decision the students have made and how they fit into their school community,” Ms. Rotondo said.
But in addition to the profile, this year’s seniors and teachers got the 101 on the application process at the end of last year. The guidance department held a college planning night at the school, where students and parents learned what they needed to do over the summer to prepare themselves, Ms. Rotondo said.
Prior to leaving for the summer, teachers also learned tips for writing teacher recommendations, and students were advised to ask their teachers to do so over the summer to lessen the burden during the school year.
But as the school is still in its infancy, Ms. Rotondo said, the guidance department also had to get the school’s name out to colleges. That included sending letters to the colleges, inviting them to visit the school, ensuring they put Robbinsville High School on their mailing lists and learning more about their college processes and what they are looking for in the school. About 25 colleges have already signed up to visit the school, she added.
In addition, the guidance office has a new database called Naveat, which tracks all students, including their GPA scores, where they applied and which colleges accepted them. It serves two purposes to help current seniors track the process of their application and to be useful for future seniors and their parents in the coming years to see where their peers have gone as they plan where they would like to attend college.
”It’s really a great tool to students and parents,” she said. “The more data they have the better (it is for them) to make a decision.”
As the new school year dawns, Ms. Rotondo said she just wants to prepare students for whatever they pursue after high school.
”This is a tradition that we’re starting, and we get to be a part of it, and our seniors get to lead the way,” she added.

