Everywhere you turn, there they are. They attend classes, eat their lunches, and interact with you as easily as anyone else. Unless you’ve been around a while, you may not recognize they’re different. All left the school in search of something more. All returned.

Like many, junior Nicole Antoine sought a change of pace when she went to St. Francis High School her freshman year.

“I wanted something new, a bigger school, to meet new people,” she said, criticizing Country Day’s middle-school dress code and rules.

“I thought [Country Day] high school would be more of the same,” she said.

But, less than a quarter in, Antoine realized she preferred her old school.

“At St. Francis, the classes were mind-numbing, just a lot of busy work. They’d assign tons of math problems, and the essays were exactly 1000 words—not one word more or fewer.”

Junior Lauren Taylor experienced similar frustration at Loretto High School the first month of her sophomore year after giving Country Day a try as a freshman.

“Nine sentences to a paragraph, 60-120 vocabulary words a day. The nightly history reading was excessive, and they’d grade your notes. But that’s all they did: grade. No discussion or analysis like at Country Day,” she said.

“At Country Day, student relationships with teachers make learning much easier,” Antoine said.
Junior Jackie Fischer, who spent a quarter of her sophomore year at St. Francis, concurred.

“[Math teacher] Ms. Jacobsen takes time out of her day to help us with whatever problems and questions we have,” she said.

Senior Jillian DePoy knew instantly a huge school was not for her on her first day at Loretto.
“It was an instinctive ‘oh-my-gosh’ moment,” she said.

Freshmen Sydney Stansberry and Carter Brown also missed small class sizes during their time in Granite Bay High School’s International Baccalaureate Program, Stansberry for three weeks and Brown for two.

Their freshman class was over 700 students; classroom occupancy averaged 30-40.

DePoy was turned off by Loretto’s relatively distant teachers, as was Taylor.

“One honestly thought my name was Katie,” Taylor said.

Both also disliked the religious aspect.

Taylor’s friends downplayed the significance of liturgies and prayers, but these came as a rude shock to Taylor, a non-Catholic.

At least four classes started with memorized prayers, and daily liturgy (a shortened Mass) attendance was mandatory.

At St. Francis, Antoine chafed under what she called a “factory for girls.”

“I would get detention for leaving my locker open,” she said.

Curriculum-wise, Granite Bay is so rigid it requires anyone playing in the music program to join marching band.

“You needed to march to even study music theory,” said Brown, who wanted to play in the jazz band.

Her second day at Loretto, DePoy’s mother picked her up at snack and drove her directly to Country Day’s Orientation—in her Loretto uniform.

The difference was immediately noticeable.

“Before I even introduced myself, teachers knew my name, and even more, they knew something about me,” she said. “The teachers are more accessible, and they address and approach students as individuals.”

This year, DePoy was the only student in AP French.

“They weren’t going to offer it as a class, but I talked with [head of high school Sue] Nellis and [French teacher Richard] Day and we worked out a schedule,” she said. “They did everything they could to ensure I could take French and finish AP.”

Perhaps the greatest draw for those looking from the inside out is the promise of better social lives at larger schools.

But Taylor found that instead of finding many new friends at Loretto, she only met her friends’ friends, while DePoy learned that academic opportunity supersedes social atmosphere.

“When I got back, I found everything else made such an impact that I didn’t need the Loretto- or Jesuit-style social life,” DePoy said.

“Even though you know more people there, you don’t know them very well,” Antoine agreed.

At St. Francis, Fischer thought she’d expand her social horizons. “But once I got there, I realized the social aspect wasn’t as great as I’d been told,” she said.

“I never took academics into account. I went for the wrong reasons.”