By Ian Camacho Cendejas
Staff Writer
This year, Santa Rosa High School’s student population has been dropping significantly. With students either going to Ridgway or dropping out, we started at 1700 students and have gone down to 1567 as of this being written.
This issue has been brought to the attention of our principal, Dr. Mark Ryan, and he has been thinking of ways that we can make our school more appealing for potential Panthers. Ryan has discussed this topic during Coffee with the Principal and has proposed the idea of having more sports in which students would be interested or new clubs that can bring more students together. During his conversations about promoting our school, Ryan has turned to students and asked for ideas on promoting our school and increasing enrollment.
There are many ways that we can promote our school, but not all of them may be effective. Ryan has had the idea of recording videos and playing them in movie theaters so that other people can see SRHS students caring about each other and enjoying themselves. This can help spread the word about how we are a welcoming school and of the unique opportunities we offer.
Another method of promotion could be to have teachers or students of our high school visit middle schools. During students’ lunch, they could provide brochures of our school to show all the qualities that make us unique from other high schools. “If you want to get more people to enroll in our school specifically, the best way would be to send teachers, former students, and maybe even club leaders [and] student council members to visit the various middle schools in the area and share their own experiences and the benefits that the school has that aren’t in other high schools,” said junior Edwin Sánchez.
Another way we could make our school more appealing is by showing off our ArtQuest students’ work and recording and posting it on social media. Ryan’s idea is to have it played in a movie theater before a movie so that we stand out more. “I was thinking about using our resources like ArtQuest. It’s our specialty, and these artists are able to create really good things, including different visual and physical media,” said junior Margarita Umali
Our school population is still going down, but at a slow rate. If you have an idea about what we can do to increase student enrollment, share it with Dr. Mark Ryan; he would love to hear it.
