Pleasantville HS Guidance Talks College Stats

Update: This story has been corrected to reflect that Joyce Connell is coordinator and counselor of the Pleasantville High School Guidance Department.

PLEASANTVILLE, N.Y. – The Pleasantville School District guidance staff gave its annual report to the board of education Tuesday evening at the board’s scheduled meeting at Pleasantville High School.

A major aspect of the report was focused on how the school prepares students in Pleasantville High School to move on to college after graduation as the guidance department plays a major role in the application process.

Joyce Connell, guidance department coordinator and counselor at Pleasantville High School, spoke of the importance for students to be diverse in their academics and extracurricular activities.

“While most students might seem very similar or equal in terms of their education, there is a unique part of the selection process that is very important,” Connell said.

In the annual report, the department showed that college advising consumed most of the counselor’s time, equaling about 38 percent of their total work.  Advising was followed by academic advisement and time spent with the special education programs. 

Connell and other counselors went over statistics about the recent class of 2011 and its college attendance.   Students in the 2011 class featured a college acceptance rate of 61 percent, with 33 percent of students being accepted into highly competitive institutions. In total, 41 students from the class of 2011 attended highly competitive institutions, such as Columbia, Cornell, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  That total number was down from the class of 2010, in which 51 total students attended similar colleges.  However, Connell said that was a result of the 2011 class being much smaller in total size. 

The guidance department also reported that many students in the class of 2011 were able to attend those colleges and universities by earning scholarship money.  In total, students at Pleasantville High earned nearly $4 million in scholarship funds. 

Board member Louis Conte, although proud of the department’s achievements, questioned whether the guidance office could still be a place for students to deal with personal issues.  Connell assured Conte and the board that was indeed still the case.

“We hope it’s still the case that we are a place where students can visit to deal with all of the problems that they face,” Connell said. 

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