College Counseling

Advising

When you enroll at Sparhawk Upper School, you are assigned an advisor who will coach you throughout high school. Your adviser helps you choose courses, extra curricular activities and community service opportunities based on your goals and what lies ahead for you. Your adviser also helps you consider what has worked and what is challenging as well as mapping out a plan for dealing with challenges. In addition to being available to you on an individual basis, advisors meet once a week with assigned advisees as a group. This is a time for individual coaching, but also for the group to get to know one another. Activities include going on short field trips, playing games, cooking and doing community service.

Personal Counseling

The primary goal of counseling at Sparhawk High School is to support you in your educational and personal development. Our counseling services provide personal and academic counseling to enable you to utilize your talents and make intelligent decisions for your future. Our role is to counsel, consult, coordinate, collaborate and advocate with you, your parents and school faculty to support academic achievement, and to help you prepare for your future academics, as well as career and personal social areas.

If you encounter a personal issue that seriously interferes with your academic progress, we will work to support you. Sparhawk High School has a part-time, Licensed Clinical Social worker on staff who is available for intervention and outside referral as needed. Our counseling staff considers your health or emotional concerns important and so treats them with respect and confidentiality.

In your junior year at Sparhawk, you will take an SAT and ACT preparation course. In this course, you learn test taking techniques and build on your existing study and essay writing skills. Sparhawk High School is committed to preparing you for the rigors of standardized testing without compromising our focus on a progressive curriculum that fosters critical and creative thinking skills. We know this approach is successful. Over the past ten years, several Sparhawk students have been honored by the National Merit Scholarship Corporation for their outstanding PSAT scores.