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| Patrick Donohue and Jamila Clark |
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| Lilia Medina (left) & Sara Espinosa |
Glenbard East parent Lilia Medina attended the Bilingual Parent Advisory Committee (B-PAC) and
GPS-Spanish program on financial aid with Sara Espinosa of the Illinois Student Assistance Committee and shared this takeaway: "College is expensive and we need to understand the financial aid package offered by each college to determine the best fit for the family."
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| Carol Hart |
Glenbard West parent Carol Hart shared the following takeaway from the FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) Completion Assistance Workshop: "Having the ability to get one-on-one help filling for Federal Student Aid - something every senior needs to complete -- was extremely useful, as it is the form that the federal government, states, colleges and other organization use to award financial aid.
GPS will host an additional FAFSA completion workshop at 10 a.m. Saturday, Oct. 13, at Glenbard East. Learn more here.
Parents can help their children on the path to success by helping them realize that, rather than being linear, the path forward is a series of ups and downs. At the down points, parents’ key role is to remind kids that failings are just stops along the way on a growth trajectory, rather than the endpoint. Parents are here to buffer kids’ tendency to feel things are worse than they actually are—failing is an event while being a failure is an identity to avoid. So, when things do go wrong, 3 questions need to be asked: What happened? What can we learn from it? And What is the way forward? Parents and kids should expect about three crises per school year and take them in stride when they happen. Let’s all focus on the things we CAN control—attitude and effort. In terms of school work, employ the Pomodoro technique that encourages 25 minutes of work followed by 5 minutes of downtime, and let’s encourage our kids to read at least 20 minutes a day on non-school work. The difference it makes in a lifetime cannot be underestimated!!