WOODBURY – With spring quickly approaching, the days are getting longer and the weather is getting warmer, and another event apprehensively approaches Nonnewaug High School juniors – the SAT.
The SAT is an imperative exam that can change the trajectory of a high school student’s opportunities.
While it may be daunting for students, many colleges and universities withhold certain SAT score requirements for admission, along with scores affecting scholarships or even acceptance into specialized programs.
Gianna Desjardins, a junior at NHS, emphasizes how obtaining a high score on the SAT is crucial for many high school students to achieve.
“Getting a high score on the SAT is important for me and for other highschoolers because it not only helps for college admissions, but it can benefit you later on in life,” said Desjardins. “Even if you don’t necessarily need it now you are going to need it later on because it can also help provide future jobs, internship opportunities, and of course, anything to do with college.”
With the 2025-26 school year, Nonnewaug administrators have implemented a new SAT preparation initiative, aiming to not only help increase students’ individual scores, but also to improve Nonnewaug as a whole.
“Our goals are individual and also collective,” said Nonnewaug vice principal Declan Curtin. “In terms of every student, we want each student to improve. But more importantly, [additional SAT prep] would help our school overall because we want all our students to do well and we know the importance of that high stakes test.”
A plethora of SAT prep has been incorporated throughout the school year to help combat unsatisfactory scores at Nonnewaug, from Tribe and Focus enrichment groups for juniors, to SAT type questions being interwoven into class content.
“In the last five years, we noticed our SAT scores were going down,” said Curtin. “We found that not to be acceptable, and we wanted to improve that. Luckily, last year, we actually went up, I believe it was 19 points total in one year, which is a significant jump. And that’s because we made a lot of decisions to bring in more SAT prep, to offer the SAT prep course, and we turned Tribe and Focus into SAT prep for some of the juniors, along with creating an enrichment group this year for those juniors who did well on the PSAT. We want to take them and bring them up to really high levels. So, ultimately, we have doubled down on that decision this year.”
Charlotte Davis, a junior at Nonnewaug High School sees value in her SAT enrichment Tribe and Focus classes.
“I think that a lot of the SAT prep that we’ve done has been pretty valuable,” said Davis. “A lot of the prep that we do is specifically how to answer the questions quickly. I know in our English SAT prep, we’ve discussed how to answer the questions with certain strategies and tricks. That way, it helps us not run out of time, because sometimes I don’t have enough time to answer all the questions thoroughly enough. So I think that learning the strategies is a really good way to help, and doing the SAT Prep is a good way to prepare us to take that test.
Kathryn Aseltine, English SAT prep teacher highlights the skills the class targets to sufficiently prepare students.
“We do a lot with strategies, like figuring out how to find the right answer,” said Aseltine. “For example, If there’s four different options, what can you do to reduce it down to maybe two options? Sometimes it’s just knowing what the question’s asking, and then we spend a lot of time with the grammar and the vocabulary to help support that as well. So I think that’s the way the class really helps the students because there’s certain things that you just need to know about the test in order to be successful on it.”
This year’s SAT is set to be taken on April 1st in Chiefs classes, with hopes that the added preparation will result in growth collectively.
“So individually, it’s about improvement, and then we hope that the collective totality of all those individual successes will equal school success,” said Curtin. “Last year’s jump was significant, and we’re hoping that this year, we can get something similar.”
