On average, 82.5% of student applicants are accepted to St. Paul Academy and Summit School. This year, 24 new students were welcomed into the ninth-grade community. When ninth-grader Iris Bergad, who moved from Friends School of MN, and ninth-grader Solomon Rutzick-Bailey, transferred mid-year from King Solomon School in Tel Aviv, Israel, recalled their first days, they both had positive reviews.
Looking back on his first day, Rutzick-Bailey said, “I thought it was pretty cool. And the schedule was way more cohesive than [in] Israel. And I have already met some nice people. It was good.”
Leading the Randolph Campus office is Associate Director of Admission and Financial Aid, Anne Marso, who has been with the admissions team for 17 years, as well as Sylvester Cutler who is the Director of Enrollment Management who joined the admissions crew this school year.
Marso listed some things she thought made the school magnetic to applicants.
“I feel like our community really showcases itself well. Some of the classes we offer are really unique, and I think the style of our classroom setting, the discussion-based learning style, is very interesting for a lot of families,” Marso said.
Cutler agreed, adding that “SPA’s academic reputation really lends itself to people who are looking for a bit of a challenge.”
To keep the school an option for a wide variety of applicants, financial aid support is, at times, a necessity. Marso described the financial aid system that uses both in-office evaluations and a third-party evaluation company.
“We are entirely need-based with our financial aid program. We want our families to be able to access school, so our goal is to bridge the gap between what a family can afford and what our tuition is. That’s important to us.” Marso said.
Marso and Cutler both mentioned a funnel process to admissions. Starting with open houses and shadow day and ending with possible acceptance to the school, the funnel effect helps the admissions staff narrow down the applicant pool, as seen in the percentages above.
Another main way to stand out amongst other Twin Cities area private schools is the academic reputation; the campuses hold the ranking of 206th best K-12 private school in the United States, ranked out of 3,180, putting SPA in the top ~6.5%.
Solomon Rutzick-Bailey and his family recognized this in their application process.
“I think SPA is pretty well known to be a good school and has lots of opportunities for good [colleges] and extracurriculars,” Rutzick-Bailey said.
While national ranking is something measurable with numbers, the trueness of diversity and inclusion efforts are something that is only measurable through the lenses of students’ everyday lives.
Bergad identifies as a Chinese person and described her experience finding people who match her identity.
“Our school isn’t super diverse, but it’s definitely more diverse than some,” Bergad said. “I personally haven’t joined any Asian affinity groups but they’re all very welcoming and there are so many of them. I’m also friends with [tenth-grader] Rachel Guo, she’s also Chinese.”
Rutzick-Bailey identified himself as culturally Jewish, but doesn’t subscribe to the religious aspect. He said, “I’ve noticed people here are way [respectful] of opinions.”
On another level, diversity has to be considered when accepting and guiding students through the process.
Cutler said, “Our goal [in the admissions office] is to have a student body that reflects the Saint Paul community … so that’s what we use as a benchmark looking at demographics. We keep in mind racial diversity, socio-economic diversity, and gender diversity.”
Marso explained that prospective families get their DEIB questions answered in a number of ways, from looking at information on the website to speaking with the Director of Intercultural Life. “I think our affinity groups speak very positively to the kids’ experience here,” Marso said. “We oftentimes will connect families to Dr. Naomi Taylor just to understand more about how that is reflected in our actual student body,” she added.
The bulk of the admissions process is organized by season, applications opening in the fall and closing in late winter/early spring. No applications are accepted until the first of September of the school year before the year the student will be attending the school and must be submitted by Feb. 1 of that same school year.
Marso described her role in the process: “We start with families who we call ‘inquiries,’ families who are really just looking at schools in general and trying to think about where they want their children to attend.”
Cutler said that timeline-wise, “After the inquiry forms, they get to the middle of the road, where people are now fully applying. “They will then submit an application. The initial application form just gets them into our platform, Finalsite Enrollment, and at that point they get to the admissions checklist.”
“Then for that group,” Marso added, “there’s an application, teacher evaluations and transcripts, then a visit and an interview.”
The admissions process is not often spoken about from the inside looking out. Looking from multiple perspectives is crucial for understanding the process behind the new students we meet when they join the community. Throughout the complexity of applying to a new school, three simple things are key to having a good experience: Look inward — explore the foundation of the process from the perspective of the people who guide it; Look outward — observe the process from the people in the community who’ve also been through it; And, make connections — find the people who make the process worth it.
