EF Academy Pasadena

Monthly Family Newsletter: May 2024

Dear Families,

It is a joy to write our May 1 Family Newsletter. I absolutely love May in schools, as the month is packed with celebrations, moments of reflection, and lovely send-offs. There is so much to look forward to this month!

This weekend is our school-wide prom, on Saturday, May 4. Students will enjoy the opportunity to dress their best and dance the night away together with their classmates. Local families are welcome to attend the “pre-prom photo opp” from 4:00pm – 5:15pm on campus to see our students off before they board the buses to prom.

Next week students will produce our first ever spring musical production, Disney’s The Descendants! We are excited to perform in our very own Robinson Center. Our theater department, student media services team, and facilities department are hard at work converting our amazing athletics arena into a theater complete with scenery, backstage, and lighting. It is going to be a very exciting transformation. The show is open to the public on Thursday, May 9, and Friday, May 10.

May 10 is also our Innovation & Impact Symposium, where student groups share with our school community about their progress on their action projects from this year. It has been exciting to watch student teams move through the Design Thinking process and develop projects that make an impact towards one of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. The symposium is also open to families.

The week of May 13 is Senior Week, with all of the exciting end-of-year events for the class of 2024. Seniors will enjoy Grad Night at Disneyland on May 14, followed by our first annual Senior Sleep-In on May 15. On the afternoon of May 15, we will have our final advisory meal and school-wide yearbook signing event. On May 16, seniors and their families will have the opportunity to have a dinner at the Head of School's house, followed by a party on campus for Grade 12. Our seniors then have Graduation Rehearsal on May 17 and will be awarded their diplomas in Robinson Center on May 18! Our full student body, faculty, and & staff will be there to celebrate this amazing milestone in EF Academy Pasadena's history… our first graduation! We then say goodbye to Grade 12 as they depart campus as our first alumni on May 18.

Simultaneous to all of these amazing events, our students will be sitting for AP Exams across the weeks of May 6 – May 17. For students who elected to take these exams, we are excited for this culmination of a year of hard work and study in these rigorous college-level courses. Wish the best of luck to the 97 students taking AP exams in 24 different subjects this month!

Grades 9-11 will remain on campus for an additional week after graduation. These students will wrap up their classes and prepare for the Showcase of Learning on May 24. In the Showcase of Learning, students select and present upon the work of which they are most proud and which serves as the strongest evidence of their competencies. The Showcase offers students the opportunity to reflect on their year of growth and to enter their best work into their portfolios. The creation of these portfolios every year supports students in preparation for university applications in Grade 12. Both our students and the adults writing their recommendations can review the portfolio to help highlight their unique strengths and describe their most amazing work products generated across high school.

Speaking of the university application process, I am so thrilled to share that May 1 begins our month of sharing about the exciting university results from our first graduates! Our acceptance list exceeds 115 colleges and universities across the globe, and many of our students have begun to commit to schools. On this pdf you can see all acceptances, with current matriculations in bold. We do still have students in the decision-making phase, so the matriculation list will continue to be updated throughout May (and into the summer for some European schools).

In addition to reviewing the list, I invite you to follow along on Instagram as we highlight seniors and their chosen schools this month. We launched last night with a sneak peek of our world map on campus with pins placed where our students have committed to go next year! Pay extra attention on May 15, as we will be engaging our seniors in a “signing day” activity where they make their matriculation decisions final. There is certain to be a lot of great photos on Instagram that day of our seniors making the choices that map their next step in the bright futures! We are so very proud of them all.

I want to conclude this newsletter with a shout out to our University and Academic Counseling (UAC) team of Kyle Kurfirst, Melissa Royal, Jay Shamlin, and Jessica Williams, who were fearlessly led by our Director of University and Academic Counseling, Jim Sargent, and heartily supported by our amazing Registrar, Michelle Barnett. Our seniors literally had a world of opportunities available to them as they thought about their next step in their education. I am so proud of how our UAC team made this possible for them through tireless hard work of coaching and mentoring our seniors, partnering closely with their families, and building meaningful relationships with college and university admissions offices across the US and abroad to help them understand the powerful education EF Academy Pasadena provides to students. Our school’s mission is to “open the world through education,” and our UAC office lived this mission this year as they opened the post-secondary world for our graduates!

Thank you, as always, for entrusting us with your wonderful children. We are looking forward to these final weeks together as a community and our final moments with our senior class. I hope you enjoyed the collage at the beginning of this newsletter, featuring photos of our complete class of 2024!

All the best,