Class of 2011: More Than 650 College Acceptances

The Wakefield guidance department appeared before the School Committee at Tuesday’s meeting to present their report on the past year.

In his report, A.J. Beebe, director of guidance at Wakefield Memorial High School, gave college statistics for the graduated Class of 2011, along with MCAS and AP figures and an overview of how the guidance office itself operates.

“It’s been another industrious, productive and rewarding year,” Beebe said. “To get where they are today, the students mailed on average four college applications, each resulting in the guidance office processing over 1,200 transcripts. This number does not include midyear reports sent to every college, transcripts needed for scholarships and job opportunities nor the final transcripts processed to each school our students are attending. That brings our total number of transcripts sent on behalf of our students to over 1,800.”

Beebe went on to discuss how the heavy workload of applications and transcripts ultimately paid off. According to Beebe, students applied to 191 different colleges, yielding 649 total acceptance letters. As a group, Beebe said, the next year, including some distinguished institutions like Harvard, Dartmouth, the University of Pennsylvania, Syracuse, BC, BU and the Mass College of Art and Design.

The data gained from this year’s college acceptances will be put to good use next year as well.

“The counselors and I have finalized our annual college decision data that we compile each season,” Beebe said. “This data allows us to internally evaluate trends in acceptances and denials to better our department in advising our students in the future.”

In that respect, the department already had some projections for the Class of 2012’s college prospects.

“The Class of 2012, approximately 76 percent of our students will be attending four year schools, 12 percent will be attending two year schools,” Beebe said. “Seven percent will be off to the world of work, four percent have chosen to go into trade or prep schools and about one percent will join the military.”

Beebe also said that students took full advantage of the AP tests that were available to them.

“We had 108 students take 185 AP exams this year in 15 different subject areas,” Beebe said. “We offered two new AP courses this year, Human Geography and Music Theory, they were both very well received and quite a few kids took the test.”

The results of the AP exams, as well as the MCAS exams, will be available later this summer. Members of the school committee, as well as Superintendent Joan Landers, commended Beebe and the Guidance Department for their hard work, pointing out in particular the fact that each guidance counselor at the high school is assigned to over 200 students each.