The first line in Lick-Wilmerding High School’s mission statement reads, “A private school with a public purpose, LWHS is founded upon a legacy of serving, and being enriched by, students from all walks of life.” In the incoming frosh class, there are 139 students coming from 71 different middle schools. When recruiting students, LWHS admissions makes an effort to bring in students from varying demographics, and has implemented various resources and programs to smooth the transition for freshmen. Specifically, when looking into the transition from public middle schools to private high schools, there are still additional challenges public school students face regarding adapting to LWHS’ new environment.
While the academic transition is often highlighted as being difficult for all incoming freshmen, many students from public middle schools feel particularly alienated when coming into a private high school. For example, current LWHS students shared how differences in their education prior to high school made them shy away from contributing in class in their first year here.
Raya Shveyd ’22 went to public K-8 at Claire Lillienthal. She said, “I felt inferior to the private school kids in a classroom setting. I was really scared to share my answer because I knew that the type of education that they had prepared them for an environment like Lick. I didn’t feel like I was prepared and, at first, it deterred me from participating in class discussions.”
Joe Dolce ’23, who attended Everett Middle School, said, “I felt like the kids from private schools had this set of skills that I had not received and it made me feel insignificant academically, especially when I was in Algebra 1 and other freshmen were already in Algebra 2 Accelerated.” He added, “Since freshman year I have definitely grown, but in the beginning I kind of felt self-conscious around academics.”
photo by Primo Lagaso Goldberg
As a 14-year-old, it is so easy to compare oneself to their classmates and base their perception of intelligence on something as subjective as a math class placement or grade. Over the years, LWHS has put into place various programs and resources to try to ease the adjustment from middle to high school.
Chris Yin, Dean of Students for freshmen and sophomores, has been at LWHS for over 25 years and has seen these programs come and go. There have been numerous adaptations made by the school due to feedback from the community.
The most recent program enacted by the school is called Tigers Leading Change (TLC). Its purpose is to create as inclusive an environment as possible for students coming to LWHS from varying backgrounds. According to the the program’s description, the main goals of TLC are for students, “to feel a sense of belonging and connection, to feel empowered and confident, to be their authentic selves, and to ultimately provide our students with the skills and leadership opportunities to help us imagine and realize a stronger and more inclusive LWHS community.” The program includes an on-campus week in the summer to give a preview of students’ time at LWHS. The students develop relationships with older students and adults at the school, and they continue to meet with mentors throughout the school year to strengthen leadership skills.
According to Yin, one of the most important aspects of the high school transition is the ability to learn how to utilize the resources LWHS provides for its students. She said, “We have all kinds of resources on campus that we are constantly inviting and reminding kids to use. For example, the LSC, or our counselors, or working with the Center, or even being interns in the Center or admissions offices. Also, seeking out academic help from their class deans or advisors.” LWHS asks a lot from their students academically, but has made a large effort in creating an environment that feels welcoming and easy for students to receive help in.
Although these resources are available for every incoming student, Yin has observed that there is a difference in which kids decide to use them. “We have tremendous layers of support at this school and many students coming from public schools aren’t familiar with those systems, don’t know how to access those systems, and feel like they are seen as failures if they access these systems. Generally speaking, students coming from independent schools know that actually everyone accesses these systems,” Yin said. “I tell students that, actually, it is the strongest students that are accessing teachers the most. It’s really interesting for kids coming from public school, they think if they meet with a teacher they are in trouble. But in actuality the students that are meeting with teachers the most are the ones who realize the resources they have and are asking really specific questions.” When the culture at a student’s middle school is one that frames meetings with teachers or the administration as a sign of failure, it is hard for a student to know to reach out for help unless they are already struggling.
Yin’s observation has been confirmed by students in the community. Kevin Guevarra ’22, who attended public elementary and middle school in Daly City, said, “When I think about my freshman year, I kind of held back a bit from doing that (reaching out to teachers and students) because I was timid to ask people for help, but as time progressed I noticed how much help you could receive from other students and faculty.”
As many students know, beginning the semester with a strong start is one of the best things you can do for your grades. Yin reflected on her experience with freshmen who have struggled academically. She said, “Of course, to get into Lick you have to be a really strong student, some say they weren’t really challenged that much in their middle school and could get A’s without studying. That is a common refrain that I hear literally every year. So, they come to Lick and are like I have eight classes, eight different teachers, I have to go all over the school and I have all this homework.” They struggle because they are just trying to figure stuff out.
“What I was seeing as the ninth grade Dean is this dip in grades and not knowing how to get up out of it, so then the rest of the semester is trying to scratch their way out of a hole they already fell into. There was this pattern over and over again and it is heartbreaking for me to see this happen; kids who I know are really bright and have so much to offer the school but are scrambling and feeling really unsuccessful because they didn’t know the systems.” The students who are new to independent schools, and are not familiar with how to succeed at one, are the ones who tend to suffer most academically when they first come to LWHS.
Even when looking at the way a classroom is set up, you can see major differences between public and private schools. Shveyd said, “Classroom settings are very different, it is definitely much more interactive at Lick.” The student to teacher ratio at most public middle schools is around 30:1, whereas at LWHS, there are never more than 18 students per classroom. Guevarra shared that one of the biggest differences between LWHS and his middle school was the class size. He said, “My middle school ranged from like 20-30 students in a class so here it was a smaller class size, meaning I was able to connect with other students more and also build a stronger relationship with my teachers.” The smaller classes can be really beneficial for most students, but it makes for an extremely new environment to adjust to.
More than just the number of students in a room, the teaching style differs greatly. Shveyd described her experience at Claire Lillienthal. “I was doing a lot of worksheets and I found I wasn’t used to learning how to actually test take or dive into books, I had no idea how to annotate,” she said, adding that she “had never studied for a math test before.” She had never been asked to use many of these specific skills before, making for an extremely difficult freshman year at LWHS.
Jennifer Selvin has been an English teacher at LWHS since 2004. She taught previously at a few different Bay Area Public High Schools. Selvin said the ninth grade English curriculum is specifically crafted because the teachers “really want students to feel seen in the classroom.” For example, this includes assigning books that, unlike many of the classic novels, provide more representation and are accessible for varying levels of English students.
Selvin said, “In equity centered education there is a lot of critique about deficit based education. That’s just when you are like ‘this group does not have the skills, we need to bring them up to par. We need to bring them in to make their deficits go away.’ One of the reasons that I react very strongly to this is that I had a parallel journey in that I was a public school teacher and then I came to work here and it was such a huge culture shift, it was shocking to me.”
The ninth grade English team reacted to this deficit when creating their curriculum. Selvin said, “We didn’t want to create a classroom where it was like we are catching kids up, like underserved kids up. No, we are going to teach the skills that we actually know that ninth graders need to learn and basically our idea was we are going to teach what you are going to need at Lick-Wilmerding. We are not going to assume anybody has them, we are going to teach them.”
Many frosh spoke about feeling like their middle schools did not prepare them for LWHS, and this type of inclusive class that Selvin describes is a direct response to that issue.
Selvin’s view on student-teacher meetings followed very closely with the outlook of Yin and many of LWHS’ students from public middle schools. She said, “It bothers me who feels like they can reach out and who doesn’t. Usually I do say something to my ninth graders at the beginning of the year which is just like, ‘depending on the school you have come out of you might think that you are bothering me as a teacher, you’re not.’”
public middle schools. She said, “It bothers me who feels like they can reach out and who doesn’t. Usually I do say something to my ninth graders at the beginning of the year which is just like, ‘depending on the school you have come out of you might think that you are bothering me as a teacher, you’re not.’”
In addition to academics, many students feel their prior schools affected their social lives at LWHS, especially freshman year. In the incoming frosh class, 27 of the 34 students from public middle schools are singletons or doubletons, meaning they are either the only person or one of two people coming from their middle school. It is already an overwhelming experience to start a brand new school, but coming in knowing only one or none of your classmates can be even more intimidating. Shveyd said, “A lot of the private school kids already knew each other. I was lucky that, from my temple, I knew some kids who went to private school, so I was able to kind of meet people.” One can feel very isolated from their grade if they feel like many other students already have friends or are familiar with more of the class.
Davion Fleming, Director of Admissions, shared details about the recruiting process for an incoming class. Every middle school provides different opportunities for their students, and that is taken into account by the LWHS admissions team. Fleming said, “You don’t want to ding a student because they don’t have the opportunity to, for example, take Algebra 2 in middle school. Some students do, and that’s awesome, but some schools don’t have the capacity to offer students those types of opportunities so you always want to make sure that you are looking at a student to see how they have taken advantage of the opportunities that their school is offering them.” In addition to considering the circumstances of each different LWHS applicant, Fleming.
Fleming described some of the careful decisions made by the school to ease students into this new environment. Some of the top priorities from the school for each frosh class are to “make sure that you know to utilize your teachers to ask for help, to build really great self advocacy and self efficacy skills, and to learn how to manage your time,” said Fleming. He explained that this is because “maybe school was easy for them in middle school, so we try to build that into our regular programming for everyone.” Although there are still gaps in a variety of aspects of school life for students from public middle schools, LWHS has taken steps to make for a more equitable learning environment.
