“Welcome to Bard. Just go straight up to the auditorium.”

These were the words we repeated hundreds of times to hundreds of eager parents at the Bard Open House on Thursday, September 24th. As we greeted BHSEC’s guests, we handed them a list of classes and student body statistics, as well as Kesi Augustine's (Class of '08) Huffington Post Article about Obama’s mention of Bard during his NAACP speech.

Perhaps it was this article that filled up all of our open houses; 600 people are expected at the next one. All parents want their kid to succeed, so it would seem like a smart move to check out a school lauded by the President himself. But the upshot was that the parents may have been the real driving force behind the students’ attendance. Some families even showed up at 4:00 for an open house scheduled for 6:00.

The pushy parent pattern continued through the rest of the open house. The ratio of parent to child questions was around 100:1. Occasionally, an 8th grader would raise a timid hand, but they mostly sunk down in their chairs (if they had been lucky enough to nab one) while their parents bombarded us with questions. “How much homework do you get each night?” was the most popular, but one mother at the high school fair actually asked, “What is the hygiene like at Bard?” It was clear that most of the parents already had an opinion about the school before they arrived, and they expected their kids to share it.

From an outsider’s point of view, the parental frenzy seems excessive, especially one woman who asked if her daughter would be getting “special treatment” because of her 97 GPA and high test scores. Then again, maybe it’s just the stress of the system. In other parts of the country, kids simply graduate to their local high school. New York City has hundreds of local high schools and the fact of the matter is, some are better than others. With all of the pressure to get into the right high school, it’s no wonder that some parents were overzealous. Hopefully, this intense motivation on the parents’ part won’t dishearten the kids. After all, they’re the ones who will be attending school for the next four years.

Remarkably, despite all the overly anxious parents, there were still quite a few stragglers coming in long after the auditorium doors closed. “…Welcome to Bard...”