Reclaiming the Lost Year

Efforts to Stem Senioritis Include Community Projects, Internships and Lessons on College

One in an occasional series looking at learning in the middle and high school years

High school senior Risa Masuda has no time to let "senioritis" get in her way.

She takes Advanced Placement courses, participates in a senior project on low-cost housing, works in student government and helps teachers during class -- an experience, she said, that made her rethink her childhood dream of being an educator.

The 18-year-old credits her school, New Trier Township High School in Winnetka, Ill., with keeping her engaged during a year commonly perceived as the time when students snooze during lectures on Hamlet's angst, take requirements they should have completed in ninth grade, do less homework than in the killer junior year and bide time before the rest of their lives begin.

But Masuda and plenty of her peers say that despite the perception of 12th grade as the lost year, it is anything but.

"If given the opportunity to graduate early, I wouldn't have taken it," said New Trier's Brian Frost, 18, who is bound for the University of Illinois. "High school is a time you can't get back, and I wanted to enjoy all four years of it. I have."

New Trier is at the forefront of efforts across the country to improve 12th grade, commonly depicted as a two-stage trial that begins with the intense period of college applications and ends with senioritis, a condition afflicting hundreds of thousands of students that is commonly manifested through malaise and apathy -- a sense of do-nothingness.

As national concern grows over the quality of America's workforce -- and with reports that about 30 percent of students who go to college need remediation -- 12th grade has become a central issue in the debate about the future of public education.

Educators say too many schools leave their seniors bored or poorly educated, pointing to the need for reform throughout high school and even earlier. Many seniors have completed nearly all or most of their academic requirements and "have no need to continue to be at a high school," said Tom Lasley, dean of the University of Dayton's School of Education.

More than half of the country's governors and various panels have called for the remaking of the grade. Among the recommendations: getting rid of 12th grade and sending students straight to college or instituting a year of public service.

New Trier went down a different path. A program was created based on the idea that today's seniors are "kids in transition" who are growing up faster in some ways than earlier generations but are less emotionally mature.

"We say, 'You guys be invested in this thing that is ending until the very last minute.' It doesn't make sense. We expect the impossible from these kids," said Larry Rehage, one of two directors of New Trier's senior program. He also educates other schools about improving 12th grade.