Peter Mitrano

8/29/2014
My School Summary

I attended Hopewell Valley Central High School (HVCHS) in Pennington New Jersey. Pennington
is about twenty minutes from Princeton. Many parents of Hopewell Valley Students work there as
doctors, attorneys, businesspeople, or professors. Simultaneously, HVCHS is also twenty minutes from
Trenton. A small portion of students at Hopewell are from Hispanic or African-American families whove
just recently moved out of those areas. There are roughly 1,200 students at Hopewell Valley CHS.
1
The
student body is about 88% white, 10% Asian, and 2% black.
1
The average cost per student in 2010-2011
was $15,540.
1

Given the well-off community, HVCHS is a well renowned high school which is best known for its
theatre and Music program, and a fledgling STEM program. I have been involved in developing this new
STEM Program by virtue of being captain of the robotics team and a mentor for an elementary school
robotics team. HVCHS offers 17 AP classes and 22 Honors courses
2
. The most common extracurricular
activities at HVCHS are sportsincluding football, soccer, and baseballand academic clubs like FIRST
Robotics, Model UN, and DECA. The diversity of clubs and courses at HVCHS is something I greatly
appreciate and would not change.
I am a part of several communities in my school, but the two biggest were Track & Field and
Robotics. I ran all three sport seasons my freshman year, and two seasons the next two years.
Occasionally, I wouldnt get back from track meets until midnight. Plus, since school started at 7:45 the

1
http://www2.hvrsd.org/Offices/business/Documents/DemographicReport.pdf
2
http://hvrsd.org/Offices/business/Documents/USERFR.HTM
next morning, doing homework and getting an appropriate amount of sleep was effectively impossible.
The start time of school is an issue that is, and rightly should be, carefully reviewed. Pushing back the
start time of school would force sports practices to either be shorter, or run later. Many students are
extremely dedicated to sports, and coaches and parents might argue that the social experience of
serious commitment to high school sports overwhelms the drawbacks of potentially poor grades and
sleep deprivation. On the other hand, the American Academy of Pediatrics said in a policy statement
that school start times should be moved to at least 8:30am
3
. In my experience, it would be better to
have lower participation in sports and shorten the practice times. This would give students more time to
focus on academics, and may also improve the amount of sleep students get.
Track was hugely important to me, and it highlights a few points of possible improvement.
Additionally, experiences in my classes illustrate one of the more deeply rooted issues. In order to
succeed in high school, I had to learn how to be a student. Regardless of how much I was learning, I
came to figure out how to get an A. Often this meant cramming the night before, checking homework
with the teacher before class, and not doing assignments I knew wouldnt be collected. I believe this to
be a side-effect of the structure of our school and most other public schools for that matter. As was
mentioned in class, the strategy that is most effective is the strategy which is least effective for
sustained education. One possible solution to this would be more frequent, but smaller, quizzes. For
teachers, this often means a lot more grading and work developing the quizzes. Additionally, this might
upset some students whove grown accustomed to this cramming strategy.

3
http://aapnews.aappublications.org/content/35/9/1.2.full.pdf+html