High School and Beyond
Preparing middle school students for the next step is a schoolwide crusade at Roxbury Preparatory Charter School.
Andreana Rivera-Thomas is ready for her next big step. With her teachers’ and counselors’ help, she’s pored over school profiles, honed her essays, and endured rounds of mock interviews. She survived the entrance exams and grillings by admissions officers.
Pretty heavy stuff for an 8th grader from a poor neighborhood. But that’s what it takes to get into a top-notch high school, and it’s par for the course at Andreana’s anything-but-typical middle school.
As her final semester at Roxbury Preparatory Charter School begins, the 14-year-old waits nervously to learn which of the five high schools she chose will accept her. But she has plenty of reason for optimism. Her little school, tucked away on a narrow, hilly street in a hard-luck Boston neighborhood, placed every one of last spring’s 8th grade graduates in public or private college-preparatory high schools. And nearly 80 percent of the students in its first three graduating classes—the only ones old enough to have finished high school...
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