Does Ivy Manor provide “guidance counseling” services?
To the extent that traditional schools provide guidance counseling, no. Parents of our students act as primary adult mentors in all respects, including helping their students apply and pay for college. In fact, we require our parents to develop a plan to research each college’s admissions policies early (beginning in the 9th grade, at least two schools per year) to determine if specific coursework studied in high school will be accepted at whatever school their student will be applying to. However, we do provide some services that resemble guidance counselor responsi-bilities: an annual review of your student’s high school program, recommendations on coursework, high school sections of college applications (if parents prefer), and release of transcripts. The next best tool available to the homeschooler is often the most underused, possibly because it is not well understood and/or promoted in the homeschool community. This tool is the relatively new GACollege411 website (www.gacollege41
