College Signing Day...Take 1

I was so excited to bring this celebration to my school this year after learning more about it at the White House Convening in San Diego and the Evidence Based School Counseling conference in Kentucky.

This year's event was small scale, no college reps could be present, but we did get most of our military recruiters and the media there, We were so thankful to also have a group of parents show up!

At about 10 days out we officially decided to try to pull an event off this year, next year we will have more time to plan and really pull out all of the stops, but seriously, we planned our event in 10 days!

Check out our official event poster (below), press release and info guide for our faculty. We sent a letter home in the mail to invite parents and put a notice on our Student/Parent access portal, in our daily announcements and on our school's Facebook page.

Made with Canva

I attempted to put together a PowerPoint presentation with info about where the students are going, what they are studying & words of wisdom, similar to this one shared with us at #EBSC, but I just could not get it done in time and secure a set up that would work with our event space.

In the future I plan to create one and sneak in some college knowledge info since we will have the entire student body at the celebration.

For our event I grouped the students by college, with a couple of mixed groups. I had a senior sponsor help me get them lined up in the correct order and gave each student their certificate in line (this sounds really wonderful & organized, but the process was a little chaotic). Before we got to the college groups we asked the audience to stand, and recognized our seniors that will be enlisting in the armed forces; this group of student came out and signed their certificates first. Then each college-bound senior came to the table group by group to sign the certificate we created for them and then proceed to the stage. Once all of the seniors signed, we opened the curtains to present the entire group to the school community.

Throughout the ceremony we had our football coach MC. He announced each group and each student, sharing where they were going and what they were planning to study for the audience. The kids really got into it and the parents were so thankful we hosted the event.

During the event we recognized 83% of the senior class and our event got front page coverage in the local paper!

Our current post-secondary enrollment data does not reflect the amount of work we put into preparing our students, so we are hoping this event, along with the the other programming we delivered this year, will improve this data point.

My intern also put up our end of the year bulletin board just in time for the event. :)

Check out this College Signing Day Kit created by the White House Reach Higher staff to help you plan your event.

College pennants were donated to us upon our request.