Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
STUDENTS eye options during East Coast trip.
ROGERS — Fifty of the School District’s high school students recently toured nine colleges in five states during a weeklong bus trip.
The Rogers Honors Academy picked up the tab for the whole trip, which came out to about $1,000 per student, according to Carla Fontaine, academy director.
The students, mostly juniors, saw big schools and small schools. They got to tour Princeton University — deemed by many the best school in the country — and some lesser known, but still highly selective institutions.
The students and five chaperones boarded a
charter bus after school on April 20 and traveled through the night to Ohio. They continued on to Philadelphia, south to Virginia, then back home through Tennessee. They covered 3,200 miles, Fontaine said.
They sat in on information sessions and followed guided tours at each school. They also got to try food served in the dining halls.
Alfred Hernandez, a junior at New Technology High School, returned with a Princeton sweatshirt, though he said Princeton wasn’t his favorite stop.
“Princeton’s really cool, but I felt like a small fish in a huge pond,” said Hernandez, 16. “There are so many brilliant people there. It was overwhelming.”
He preferred two smaller schools: Kenyon College in Ohio and the University of Richmond in Virginia. He liked the feeling of community at both places, he said.
Kimberly Trejo, another New Technology High junior, liked the University of Richmond and Swarthmore College. The trip re-affirmed her desire to attend a small school.
“I feel like this trip just made everyone more open-minded about going out of state” for college, Trejo said.
“I think it was a great opportunity to branch out and see more colleges and see what you liked and didn’t like,” said Lucas Camerlingo, 16, a junior at Rogers High School.
Camerlingo said he was starting to get a little homesick by the end of the trip, but it didn’t sway him from his desire to leave Arkansas to pursue his college degree.
The academy is a district program designed to help high-performing students explore career choices and find the best colleges for them. It launched in February 2017 with the induction of 204 sophomores. Another 218 sophomores and seven juniors joined the academy in November.
The academy is available to students at each of the district’s three high schools who have at least a 3.7 grade point average and are taking at least two Advanced Placement, pre-Advanced Placement or college-level courses.
One of the program’s goals is to boost the number of district graduates who go on to enroll in a top-100 national college or university or a top-50 liberal arts school, as ranked by U.S. News & World Report.
The academy occasionally arranges trips for students to visit colleges and universities. Last month’s trip was by far the academy’s most ambitious trip. It went well, though they had to skip a planned tour of Sewanee: The University of the South because of a time issue, Fontaine said.
The academy made it a point to visit only schools that meet 100 percent of students’ demonstrated financial need.
“We wanted schools that are affordable,” Fontaine said.
Numerous students on last month’s trip said they’d be applying to at least one of the schools they saw.
Faith Dye, 16, of New Technology High School joined the trip even though she already had her heart set on attending Oklahoma State University to study speech language pathology. Going on the trip reassured her of her choice.
“You get that gut feeling of where you’re supposed to go,” Dye said. “Even though I liked all of these colleges, I didn’t have that gut feeling.”
The trip did not cost the students anything except time away from school. It came only two weeks before students took tests in their Advanced Placement classes. Six Rogers High School students interviewed by the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette said the trip set them back in their studies.
Still, said Nathan Skinner of Rogers High School, “It was worth it.”