Welcome to 2024! Everyone in the Counseling and College Center hopes you and your family enjoyed a relaxing break. All grade levels, except our Seniors, have at least one mandatory advisory session this month. Please read through the newsletter and mark your calendar for these and other important dates. Let’s make this next semester the best one yet! 
The Academic Counselors are meeting with students to discuss their course selections for next year. As a reminder, students will input their course requests into PowerSchool the week of March 4th and complete a Course Registration form for parents to sign. March 11, 12, and 13 are Course Verification Days in which students bring in their signed forms to the Counseling and College Center, and a Counselor will review them with the information in PowerSchool.
Summer course offerings will be posted on the St. Francis website in February. Students may also take summer school courses at Jesuit and Christian Brothers but must have approval from their SFHS Counselor.
This semester, class counselors will be meeting with students individually to review their course requests for next year, talk about extracurricular involvement and time management, and discuss Naviance and college information. Meetings will be conducted through the end of March.
Ms. Austin and Ms. Lee have been meeting with juniors throughout the month for their one-on-one College Planning Meetings. These meetings will continue until the end of the semester. Juniors should check their email for a Google Calendar invite and respond promptly, especially if the meeting needs to be rescheduled for any reason.
We will be uploading mid-year transcripts (which include grades from the first semester of senior year) to Common Application accounts for colleges to access. Students do not need to make a special request — we will take care of this. If you have any non-Common App schools that require a mid-year transcript, please complete the Google form Mrs. Rivera will email on January 16th.
The Department of Education launched the newly streamlined FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) form with periodic availability on December 31, 2023. During the next few weeks, you may receive a message on the FAFSA homepage that the form is unavailable due to form or site maintenance. If the FAFSA is unavailable when you or your family members try to access it, please try again later.
