The Sequoia Breeze

Rebecca: Welcome, listeners, to this episode of the Sequoia Breeze podcast. I am your host, Rebecca LaSavio. Thank you for joining us today. I'm so excited to have Shannon Breckenridge with us, and we are going to talk about all things high school.

Shannon: So welcome, Shannon, and thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Rebecca: So, Shannon, you wear a lot of hats within the schools, and I would love to hear from you because I can't describe them all, what those hats are, and a little bit more about you.

Shannon: Primarily, I've been director of high school, and that is my first love, let's say. But this year I've changed and moved into an associate executive director position. So involved in some of the things that Julie was doing and helping Janelle kind of involved in more of the Csohr finances. That fun stuff too.

Rebecca: Yes, the CSO being the charter service organization. So working with Sequoia Grove as opposed to each of the individual schools and helping to oversee the big picture with Janelle Sherman. Wonderful. And so you have many years of high school experience, and you have been in HST for many, many years, if.

Shannon: I'm not mistaken, 2001.

Rebecca: Okay, so you you know a little bit about this this and I've always.

Shannon: Had a deep love for high schoolers, so I've always had a really disproportionate number of high schoolers on my caseload. And that's just a passion of mine, helping high schoolers find their passion in life and what they want to do as they explore life after high school.

Rebecca: So today, I'm assuming that what we get to hear from you is we parents don't have to freak out about high school.

Shannon: Yes, that is true.

Rebecca: Okay.

Shannon: We are here to decrease the freak out.

Rebecca: You've already helped me with that some. So I'm excited to share the world. As many of my listeners know, I have a freshman in high school, so I'm still new to this myself. So a lot of these questions that I've been either seeking answers out in the last year or so or I'm still working on. So I'm really excited. So let's talk for a minute about somebody who's listening to us that is either trying to decide, do I keep doing this through high school, do I pull my kids that are in high school, why should I home school through high school?

Shannon: I think the primary benefit, I would say, is the ability to individualize and really craft a program that is suited to your particular student and find their strengths. Finding the strengths of your individual student is probably the primary benefit. Being able to follow their passions, work on their schedule, work with their personality. At Sequoia Grove schools we really make an effort to allow for that personalization with curriculum and different community partner offerings and making that so that it is something that you can really mold into what works best for your family what works best for your student and have it be an extension of all that you've loved about homeschooling for your tk eight years.

Rebecca: I think from what I've seen and heard, you could gather ten students that graduate through Sequoia Grove schools and you'd have ten pretty different experiences.

Shannon: Definitely. We have students that are national Fencing champions and kids that just like, oh, get me a diploma and get me out of here. We have people doing it for religious reasons, for their actors, they're helping their family business. There's just all kinds of reasons to do it and all different paths to take that still work for high school. We're an accredited school, so you have that ability to have the transcripts, to have the A to G classes, to have that kind of accreditation behind you, and get the support from our high school team and from your HST and use that to really craft a program that is all yours.

Rebecca: I've felt it from people, and I know a lot of other people, like, well, once your kids are done with 8th grade, you're going to put them in high school, right? There's this almost this idea that you can't home school kids through high school or that it's can we I mean, I think we've answered that question, but let's answer it directly. Can we home school our kids through home school? They can have a successful high school career? I'm sorry? Can we homeschool our kids through high school and they will have had a successful four years?

Shannon: Definitely. I think it starts really with the IGP and sitting down with your HST and that's our four year plan. And that's where you can really get into the details of how you're going to tailor a program to work for your student. And this is what our objectives are. This is kind of career path. This is the kinds of classes we're going to be taking, the curriculum we're using. And then that monthly check in with your HST is a big part of checking in with that plan and making sure that everything's still working and changing course if you need to. That happens sometimes.

Rebecca: Is your experience that most home schooled, high schoolers sit at home and are lonely?

Shannon: No, I think successful homeschoolers have found a community of whether that's within HSVA or through their church or scouting or club sports, they're generally out and about a lot, so hard to get the schoolwork young. But yeah, and and it's it's really a great opportunity to to have a job and to be out in the real world. Interviewing working with people that aren't just your 1716 year old peers, but you're interacting in community service projects and you have the responsibility of a job or helping with siblings, helping with the family business where you're out and there's generally a lot of interaction.

Rebecca: So if a family is interested in joining our schools or trying to decide, I have a 7th grader or an 8th grader. Are we going to continue on this path? If they've been home schooling, they probably have been thinking about this for a while, so they might have an idea for this question. But where does a parent start? How does a parent start figuring out, what do I do for high school?

Shannon: I think one of the main resources would be your high school counselor and your HST and really working as a team with those people where you're getting input on what resources we have available, what kind of curriculum options do you have that would work for you in your specific situation? Where what kinds of community partners might you want to work with? What's your student's schedule like? What are their natural rhythms? Do they like to sleep in and stay up late? Do they want to work in with the flow and the rhythm that you've had with your younger kids? There's tailoring whatever the academics are to your family life, and making it work for high school is definitely a possibility. If you get to a point where it's like, there's no way I'm teaching physics and you need to bring in resources, then working that into the rhythm so that that is a possibility too.

Rebecca: Well, I guess that's a question to be addressed, too is does a parent have to know all of the subjects?

Shannon: No. I think a lot of us that come from traditional schools and went through traditional schools, like, you see a teacher as an authority, and you see learning as, like, sitting in a seat for hours on an end. And we all know from homeschooling, younger kids, that that's really not the way that learning works. You're not taking a traditional school and putting it online or in your home school. It's a completely different way of learning, and it really encourages students to be more independent, lifelong learners. It's almost taking a college model where you're following an interest and you're taking a lot of responsibility for your learning. And it can be an adjustment if you're coming out of a traditional school, if you didn't home school all the way through elementary, but having this accountability piece that works for you and the teacher, the parent, the student, and finding a way that you can make it all work with your student on a daily basis. It's that everyday thing.

Rebecca: And as parents, we each have our strengths and our weaknesses, and I feel pretty comfortable following a curriculum. But doing writing at home, I know that I can edit my daughter's writing. I can evaluate if she's doing a good job or not. I really don't make me be in charge of her biology lab. I don't want to do that. And she has a frog waiting to be dissected in our refrigerator, but that's.

Shannon: What she loves, too.

Rebecca: We go to a biology lab tutor who sets those all up and runs them all and grades her lab reports. Because I don't know if I know what a good lab report is and I don't really want to have to do that. So I outsource that. She does a math class online, but we do history and the bulk of her biology class and her writing and all of that at home and especially literature because we love books at our house and so we do that together. But some of these other things, like I don't need the stress of trying to relearn geometry to help her with it. And so we outsource. So you can pick and choose those things that work for you and the things that don't.

Shannon: Yeah, definitely.

Rebecca: And it's fair to say we are still figuring out what our family rhythm looks like with a high schooler because she can't you know, she used to join the other kids in some of those subjects that now she does have to do her own thing. And so we are still trying to kind of figure out when can she be included and when is there just not time because she's got these other things. Totally.

Shannon: And the more you outsource, the more that changes.

Rebecca: Yeah, that's true. That's true. Which leads me into my next question. So some of the things that Sequoia Grove has to offer a high school, you've touched on some of them. But one of the other things that other ways to outsource is through junior colleges. So why don't you we have some kind of cool relationships for that with local schools. So why don't you tell us a little bit about that?

Shannon: Well, we've always had our concurrent enrollment program where you can go to any community college if you're wanting an in person college experience where you're going into the classroom, you can go to the college near you and enroll as a high schooler. There's no cost attached to it other than any materials you need to buy. So that's available everywhere. A lot of even career training if you're not thinking, like, I want to get a four year degree, but I I would love to get trained in, like, construction safety or, you know, cosmetology like those community colleges are. Great places for for that kind of job training, as well as, you know, getting those credits in place to transfer into a four year school. But we do have a special relationship with Yuba College where we have a program set up that allows our students to have a class that's totally made up of our students only. And the college professor is still a college class. It still has all the college expectations where the students going to be communicating with the professors. But all of the students in that class are Sequoia Grove Homeschooling students.

Rebecca: So there's no random 25 year old man in there.

Shannon: Exactly. And we try to make them as, asynchronous, as possible because we know home schoolers have different schedules.

Rebecca: Busy lives.

Shannon: Busy lives, very busy. We and we've tried to make a two year cycle that we go through where you can get the equivalent of an AA degree in the four years you're in high school. And so you would be going in as a freshman applicant with pretty much most of the first two years of college done, whether it's a private or a public school. Wow, that's a huge time.

Rebecca: Money saver.

Shannon: Huge time and money saver. But it's not required. If you just want to pick and choose here and there, it's completely what you feel like is doable for you. We wouldn't want to rush anybody into college work they're not ready for, because that college transcript follows you well, and.

Rebecca: You can get so much more done if your student is ready for that level of work. One semester is equivalent to a year of high school. So you can really accomplish a lot in that amount of time or have more free time.

Shannon: Right. Yeah.

Rebecca: Because in theory, you could graduate early with that. Yeah.

Shannon: Oh, yeah.

Rebecca: Okay.

Shannon: Definitely. And we do have a lot of students graduate as 11th graders. Eleven and a half graders, because we have a 200 unit grad requirement in place, which is on the low side for statewide. But that's part of our parent choice focus and trying to make it. So if you want to just meet the requirements and get done, that's an option. If you want to push yourself and apply to the Naval academy or Stanford, that's a possibility as well.

Rebecca: You could use that requirement sort of to your advantage on either end. Like, first two years of high school haven't gone well. We need to recover and move on, or I want to push and move on. I can get on to some other things.

Shannon: Right.

Rebecca: Talk about A to G curriculum that took me a long time to wrap my head around.

Shannon: Adog curriculum is what the UC approves of. It meets the rigor that we choose to. If you're going to put your stamp on a US. History class. They have to look at our syllabus and say, yeah, that is acceptable. And that makes it A to G. And A to G are the different subjects.

Rebecca: I don't remember, for instance, and I'm probably wrong because I don't remember it, but A might be social studies, b would be math, C would be English, those kind all the way down through the various classes that kids need to take. So the university system has approved certain curriculums as A to G. And if you use that curriculum, that's all you've got to do is use that curriculum.

Shannon: Yes. And if you want to apply to a CSU or a UC school right out of high school, you have to follow their 20 classes that are all.

Rebecca: A to G approved. But sequoia grove, in an effort to help us be able to have more choice and to be able to have those educational options, we can use other curriculum or other ways of teaching the same class because there is an outline that we can follow that is a to g approved. So we have the flexibility of not we don't have to choose from a limited number of curriculum. We can use this outline that the school has created with the curriculum or method that we would like to use.

Shannon: Exactly right. We have what we call generic outlines, and if you're using something that isn't specifically ADG approved, you can set it next to the Ada G generic outline and say, okay, I might need to supplement a little here, I might need to change this to fit that there's. Also in every generic outline, there is key assignments that can easily be pulled from whatever curriculum you're using and make it work that way so you can get some out of the box Ada G ready. You can make whatever your working work.

Rebecca: Is A to G. So if I'm trying to wrap my head around what homeschooling through Sequoia Grove, through high school would look like, what are the requirements, what kinds of details do I need to be sure I understand I'm signing up for?

Shannon: We do have the 200 units that I mentioned as what our grad requirements are, and that's three years of English, two years of math, and so on and so forth. And we try to make that so that there's various ways to meet those requirements. And that's part of that IGP where you're filling out what the plan is to get all those 200 credits and IGP stands for Individualized Graduation Plan.

Rebecca: Okay, yes.

Shannon: And that's something you work with your HST on crafting and you're like, oh, I would love to learn Japanese. And so you find some way to learn Japanese and that's part of your one year requirement for either fine arts or world language.

Rebecca: Okay, and then what does this school we still have to turn in samples?

Shannon: Yes, we have sample requirements. And your teacher will generally be looking for the full body of work, just like in Tk eight, where they're monitoring progress and making sure that you're making progress toward the goals and actually earning those credits for the transcript. We still have testing. I like the Star testing is for 9th through 11th graders. CASP testing is generally just 11th grade. Science is usually done in 11th grade, and that's just a way to make sure that if there's any cracks before we set you loose on the world, we want to make sure that if something's missing, we can catch any achievement and make sure that that all happens too. A lot of families and teachers, maybe they have a shared Google Doc or spreadsheet that this is where I am in this subject and these are the scores I've received on the chapter tests. Or they have some like a binder system that they use with their parents and their teachers just so that everybody's in the loop about where we are in English and in math and how we're doing, and do I need help, do we need a tutor? Do we need to focus on one subject more than another because we've fallen a little behind and just having that communication system in place is super important.

Rebecca: So from all of your many years of loving working with high schoolers and working with homeschoolers, what would you encourage parents to be excited about about their high schoolers? What do you think is maybe something parents should pay attention to and enjoy about these high school years?

Shannon: I think going just beyond the regular grad requirements and doing some career assessment and really working like no one knows your student and loves your students more than you and can see, like, what their future might hold. And you have this opportunity to really foster that at this age and try out different things that they're interested in. If you go into CCGI that everyone has a subscription to and do some personality and career types of assessments that they have built in there, where we're looking at offering the Asbab in the spring and say, oh my. Kid is a genius at taking a car apart and putting it back together. And I really want to build these skills and follow that passion and use some of this high school time to figure it out. And you're not just getting them a diploma and dumping them in college and paying for a lot of college and not having any idea where to go in the future, but using those high school years and your knowledge of their personality and their strengths and following those with them. What is the asthma that is the what does it stand for? It's the military aptitude test for careers.

Rebecca: Okay.

Shannon: And they will come and administer it for you.

Rebecca: Okay.

Shannon: And we can have it set so that the information doesn't go to military recruiters unless you want it to.

Rebecca: Okay.

Shannon: But it's one of the most thorough career assessments and that's fascinating in the country.

Rebecca: So we will try and put up a link to parents to see what that is in the show Notes and the CCGI you mentioned as well.

Shannon: That's the College and Career Guidance Initiative, and that is something that we have an account for each student. And as you take your classes in high school, they'll feed into that software and it's a way to track your A to G progress. There's also different career assessments built into that. There's ways to search for colleges and careers that are interesting to you and what kind of training you need for what careers. And there's financial aid guidance in there.

Rebecca: This is like a very rich website.

Shannon: It's a super cool website.

Rebecca: And each high school student has an account and they get in with their school ID email.

Shannon: Yes.

Rebecca: Okay. All right. Well, that's, again, linked to that too.

Shannon: If they speak with their counselor. Their counselor can walk them through that if they do some of the career assessment and say, what do I do with this information? We have three wonderful counselors that would love to have that conversation with every single one of our students.

Rebecca: Can a potential family who's looking to enroll in Sequoia Grove meet with counselors, or do they need to be enrolled?

Shannon: I think they could meet with a counselor. All three of our counselors have calendar where you can just click on a link and set an appointment with them.

Rebecca: Okay.

Shannon: Yeah.

Rebecca: And I believe that well, I don't believe and I know that those can all be found on our Homeschool helper, so if you're familiar with that, you can get on the Homeschool Helper and find the link to your counselor, depending on the alphabet. Where your last name falls, where your student's last name falls.

Shannon: All three of them are wonderful ladies. I think our high school team has over 100 years of high school experience, all combined. It's just a wealth of knowledge.

Rebecca: I have never listened to anybody from the high school team speak and not left with more knowledge than I started out with or in awe of their enthusiasm.

Shannon: Well, thank you.

Rebecca: And you are included in that.

Shannon: Thank you. There's just such a great team to work with, so fortunate.

Rebecca: And it's such a varied group of people. There's so much that goes on behind the scenes that I'm not sure a lot of our parents realize, and they may not see the faces of all the different counselors and curriculum specialists and things that are just really career training, planning, and things like that that are really incredible.

Shannon: Yeah.

Rebecca: So what are some go ahead.

Shannon: There's just a lot to high school, so it's understandable that people would be overwhelmed, and it's a lot of ground to wrap your brain around.

Rebecca: And I think when we hit high school, we parents suddenly realize, like, oh, no, they're not going to be kids forever. All of a sudden, it feels like the timer is ticking.

Shannon: There's that transition where you're wanting them to be independent adults at the end of this.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Shannon: And yeah. That that it's not an overnight process.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Shannon: It happens along the way.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Shannon: You'll see so much growth from 9th grade to 12th grade that it's and.

Rebecca: I've already seen so much from 7th to 9th. Like, it's really an incredible transition between those years, you know?

Shannon: Right. And it's nice to have them home while they're doing that.

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely.

Shannon: You can guide and help as that maturity is happening.

Rebecca: Yeah. And that there doesn't have to be vast amounts of external drama. So what are some pitfalls that you sometimes see? Some areas where you see maybe parents missing this or overreacting about this or.

Shannon: Just the level of involvement, and it's something that's always in flux. Are you over involved? Are you under involved? And finding that balance and it's going to be different with each child. Like you have more than one kid. There's more than one level of how do I foster independence with this particular child and it's not an exact science.

Rebecca: And not give them too much independence so that I don't realize they're slipping behind or struggling until it's like panic mode instead of just supporting along the way.

Shannon: Speaking of the drama, we get a lot of drama refugees like kids that are coming with mental health issues. A lot of times they're here because the traditional school isn't working out for them. Not in an academic sense, but in a more social sense. And I think maybe not a pitfall might be not calling that soon enough and looking for help and intervention and supporting that student emotionally. So just being here and recognizing that those are an issue can be something that is a way to love your child and support them.

Rebecca: Tell us a little bit about Sequoia Grove's resources for the emotional support side.

Shannon: That's been a game that's changed over COVID and people coming from other schools that have handled COVID differently than we have. But we have the special ed departments, the intervention, student services, we avail ourselves of all of those. There's drop in tutoring, there's social emotional groups, there's the high school just like a hangout and chat and all of our staff on that in those departments are very able to help us direct students to professional assistance outside of our schools if that is the level of help that's needed. So they have a lot of resources and can help get things directed with insurance. Without insurance, the parents should speak up.

Rebecca: To their HST or their counselor, their academic counselor and let them know hey, we could use some support, some extra help, some new ideas where student is struggling.

Shannon: Yeah, we don't want it to get to a crisis situation and we want to be there to really support those kids.

Rebecca: And while sometimes pulling a student out of that difficult situation can be the first step, it's not necessarily yeah, it's not the solution. Always there's still some healing to be done or relearning.

Shannon: Right.

Rebecca: We've talked about the academic part, which is the biggest? Well, the reality is to most high schoolers the academic part doesn't necessarily feel like the biggest part of life. I think it's the biggest part that we parents are thinking about. But the reality is the social aspect to life is pretty significant to this age group. And Sequoia Grove, I think in many ways differently from other charter schools takes community pretty seriously. If you want to tap into that, it's there. So let's talk a little bit about that.

Shannon: We've been doing our best. We're geographically spread out.

Rebecca: Yes. So we are not here to meet all community needs.

Shannon: No, there is that aspect I talked about earlier, like scouting or church and.

Rebecca: That sort of thing.

Shannon: But we have a national Honor Society that does community service and meets virtually. We have an academic decathlon team. We have the military program that meets once a month. Yeah, the California Cadet Corps that they drill and they're able to learn a lot of citizenship and life skills and move up the rank. It's a fabulous program. Program. We're starting an Esports team where we're going to have competitive gaming to where they're entering competitions. And this is a program that translates really well to some college programs. So there's scholarships out there for that.

Rebecca: And HSVA students really get to know each other sometimes, don't they? A lot of community through that.

Shannon: Yeah. We have a leadership class in HSBA and they planned the Harvest Festival, and it was really their choice to say, hey, we have a lot of younger siblings and we'd love to do a trunk or treat for them. And we had a lot of younger siblings show up for that. And then we had our Harvest Dance, but they're in the middle of planning a prom. They're looking at doing community college tours and having at least one social event each semester. So trying to vary the location so that the in person stuff is in different sides of town so we can catch more people.

Rebecca: That's awesome. And I love that they created something for their younger siblings because one of my favorite parts about homeschooling, high school and all the way through is that students aren't pigeonholed into. You're supposed to be friends with kids that were born within this like twelve months. And you know, kids that have been homeschooling for a long time don't feel that as nearly as acutely unless their parents are pressing it on them because they don't know that that's how it's supposed to be. They've got their siblings at home and maybe their neighbors or their cousins or their other park day kids that you play with who's available. Right. And that can really be a beautiful thing because as adults, you and I just figured out we both went to the same school and we can thoroughly enjoy talking to each other, even though we have, I don't know, tennis years or something between us, maybe. And it doesn't matter. And yet when we were little kids, we would have been so far apart in the whole school silos entirely. Right. So adulthood is not that pigeonholed age thing. So I love that home school can provide that opportunity and it can keep high schoolers from being a little too focused on just their little lives because they've got more going on around them than that.

Shannon: Right. And they can show up with food distincts or clothes that aren't cool and it's all okay.

Rebecca: I love that it doesn't matter if their shoes are the most popular.

Shannon: Exactly.

Rebecca: Is there anything else you want to say?

Shannon: We have started this year the Cap Program, the college advancement, and that's something that we're able to offer through. A grant that we've received for students that would like to go to college but maybe have historically not had anyone in the family go to college. They're part of our free reduced lunch program. They're English language learners. They're foster homeless. We have a pretty intensive push to be able to open doors for looking for a college, looking for a major looking help with the application process and college tours and that type of college search assistance that would normally a wealthier family would be able to pay for.

Rebecca: And it provides even further financial assistance than just the even school funds. Right. That program will help pay for some of the dual enrollment and those kinds of things. So it would allow their school funds to go farther?

Shannon: Yes. If you were normally using a lot of your funding to pay for HSBA classes, then you would be able to have those covered through the program, and you would have more funding to do piano lessons, if that's a passion of yours.

Rebecca: Well, is there anything else you would like high school parents to know before we wrap up today?

Shannon: It's a doable thing, and we have kids that are thriving and able to be lifelong learners. You know that it really is building those kinds of muscles. And a lot of colleges look at our independent study home school students as these kids know what's going on, they've figured out what stumbles. A lot of the kids that show up as freshmen straight out of a traditional school, they know how to learn on their own. They know how to face themselves and to have that discipline and embed learning into life. And I think that's kind of one of my favorite things about the opportunities we have for our kids.

Rebecca: Yeah, that's pretty awesome to know that we can make sure that our kids are well prepared for what's coming next. And I think being at home also means that while our kids are better independent learners, it also means that when they have a bad day, they don't have to keep trying to learn at that moment. They can focus on something's not going well, and I'm going to figure out how to process this little piece of life, and then we'll get right back into school. But I can take a breath and deal with this very real life thing that's in front of me. At least it's real to me and have a break, because that's adult life.

Shannon: And that's a life skill that all of us adults have had to work out. And we got past a point where we had to ask for a bathroom.

Rebecca: Bathroom.

Shannon: To go to a bathroom. There's some self regulation going on here.

Rebecca: Well, Shannon, thank you so much for coming and joining me today and sharing your years and wealth of knowledge and encouragement. And I always love listening to you talk because even your voice is so relaxing.

Shannon: Thank you.

Rebecca: I always feel calmer after I've listened to Shannon.

Shannon: That's very sweet of you.

Rebecca: And again, we'll have some things that Shannon mentioned in the show notes today and so you can look for those resources there. And we hope that you have found this helpful. And please, if you have any further questions or there are other high school topics that you'd like to know about, be sure to send an email to podcasts@sequoiagrove.org. Listeners, thank you so much for joining us today as we've talked with Shannon Breckenridge and explored the question of can we homeschool high school? And with that, what does Sequoia Grove have to offer? How can it support you in that journey if you choose to do so? I would love to hear from you. Please send me an email at podcasts@sequoiagrove.org. What is the best advice you ever got about homeschooling high school? What is your burning question that hasn't been answered yet? What topics would you like us to talk about specifically regarding high school in the future? I really want to know what your thinking and what your feedback is. I look forward to hearing from you. This has been another episode of the Sequoia Breeze Podcast, a breath of fresh air for your home school. I am your host, Rebecca LaSavio. Please share this episode with somebody that you think it will help and we look forward to having you join us next time. Right here. Bye.