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Eighty-three percent of SHS grads college-bound

JULIE SUTORsummit daily news
Summit Daily/Brad Odekirk
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FARMER’S KORNER – Years from now, when you see the name, “Brandon Ives,” flashing up on the screen at the MTV Video Music Awards, you’ll be able to say you saw him here first.Perhaps it was on the comparatively humble Summit High School stage during a student film fest. Or maybe you caught Ives on Summit County’s Channel 10 one night, as you battled insomnia at 2 a.m. by watching the Frisco teen, clad in a black leather jacket, lip-synching the melancholy lyrics of a Duran Duran tune in one of his very first music videos broadcast on an episode of Tiger TV.”Who do you need? Who do you love – when you come undone?” his character wailed, adolescent angst dripping from his face to the steering wheel of his estranged girlfriend’s car.Come August, Ives will venture to the Big Apple, where his video production ambitions will be put to work at New York University in one of the top undergraduate film programs in the nation.”I don’t know how I’m going to handle it,” Ives said. “I’m really excited to be going to college in general – I’m going to have so many opportunities and diverse cultural resources in New York City. I’m so overwhelmed.”Ives is one of 13 SHS grads in the class of 2005 who have enrolled in some of the country’s top four-year institutions, at least, according to Barron’s 2005 “Profiles of American Colleges.”Some of Ives’ fellow Tiger grads will sit in classrooms at the University of California at Berkeley, Duke University, American University and Colorado College, among other “highly competitive” and “most competitive” schools – Barron’s top two rankings in admissions competitiveness.Members of the class also received acceptance letters from (but chose not to enroll at) the University of Michigan, Harvard University and Dartmouth College.”My feeling is that it’s been a really successful class,” said Jody Cheatum-Wilson, SHS senior counselor. “We have a Boettcher Scholar, two National Merit Scholars, one going to the U.S. Air Force Academy. I can’t remember the last time someone got into Harvard.”These students looked way outside the box at all their options across the U.S., from the East Coast to California,” she added.Of the Tigers’ 173 graduates this spring, 83 percent will attend college. That figure is relatively high compared to the past five years, second only to last year’s 91 percent. Twenty-seven students will attend two-year schools and 117 have signed up at four-year institutions.”We hope that most have some kind of postsecondary plans, and for some of them it may just be work in a particular field. But we’re constantly having that conversation, even if they’re in the office for a schedule change,” Cheatum-Wilson said.Of those attending four-year colleges, 73 will remain in Colorado, with 49 headed to the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado State University or the University of Northern Colorado.Two of the class’s Hispanic students will pursue undergraduate degrees at universities in Mexico.Julie Sutor can be reached at (970) 668-3998 ext. 203 or jsutor@summitdaily.com.


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