Lake Central hosted its second shadow day on Wednesday, Nov. 7. Last year’s program helped 20 students realize that they wanted to attend Lake Central.
In order to get shadowed, you have to be part of the mentor program which you sign up for in the spring and get trained for during summer and beginning of fall. The mentor program is run by Mrs. Rettig, Guidance, who put together the shadow program.
“Students who attend private schools in the Lake Central District are invited to come and spend a day with one of our students here, a junior or senior who participates in the mentor program. I think Lake Central offers a lot of opportunities for students. I think it opens people’s eyes to more options. Anyone who wants to come can, there are no limited amount of spots. We send mail out that has links on it for students of other schools can access to log in. The mentor leaders get together at a meeting and we try to individualize the program, and we try to ask in the google form what the shadows interests are, academics, athletics, clubs, things like that, and then the mentors get together to look at all that and try to match that up by interests,” Mrs. Rettig, Guidance, said.
The eighth graders from other schools are supposed to shadow someone with similar interests that’s in the mentor program.
Jed Burgos (12) had a shadower, Carter Moran (8), who had a lot to say, “I chose to do this program because I wanted to just know what Lake Central was all about, since I’ve never been inside and never really knew anything about it. I have learned that there are a lot of good people here and everyone’s funny, nice and everyone really cares about school here. The size of the school scared me, especially on the outside, but then just walking around. I am happy I got Jed, he’s a very good person to shadow, he pays attention in his classes and he’s really funny. We have a lot of similar interests, I really like publications and US History, they both seem really interesting to me. I think the program matches the two of us together well. I came from Saint John Evangelist I’m in eighth grade and I would like to come here next year.”
Some members of the mentor program were not originally in the club and had no problems.
“The mentor program actually had to go outside of that list for the club, so I got picked because I matched the interest of someone of the kids. I was not technically in the club, I signed up for it, but could not make the meetings because of personal reasons so I could not get trained for it. I’m glad I had my shadow follow me, she was really nice and I think as a whole the group was very respectful and nice and they knew how to socialize and relate on some things, I think they did a really nice job on picking who should go with who. I would like to do it next year if I had the chance because it is a unique experience. The teachers get exposed to the younger kids as well, so then you can do activities based off of them them. I did not run into any problems with any of my teachers luckily, but I heard some people did not have any open seats for their shadow,” Nicole Rytczak (11) said.
