Fannin County High School’s senior and freshmen counselor, Dr. Patricia Slagle headed up the school’s second annual participation in the “Georgia Apply to College Month.”The program, initiated by the governor’s office three years ago, is designed to give Georgia high school seniors opportunities to apply to post-secondary educational institutions. The program, initially designed to be a week long, now is currently carried out over an entire month. Dr. Slagle estimated that “almost 200” schools participated in the program.

Jill Key, the graduation coach, said, “It’s a good thing that they spread it out,” due to the high number of students interested in participating.

The students were invited to schedule a time to come down to the media center or computer lab in order to fill out college applications.

“We try to be sure that every student has an opportunity,” Slagle said.

The students were instructed to seek out www.gacollege411.org in order to retrieve valuable information regarding the post-secondary application process.

“It’s a wonderful opportunity. We do it through gacollege411.org. There’s guide ways that they have available that they ask the students to try to do,” Slagle said.

The counselors were excited by the results, especially with students that were leaning towards a school for one reason or another, only to find that the some the school that they were interested in did not have the field of study that they were looking for.

“I was kind of amazed helping some of them. They were looking at a school and they said, ‘well this school doesn’t have physical therapy’ or something like that. So I said, ‘well maybe you need to pick a different school,” Key said.

Some of the students interested in schools were intrigued by the schools for a plethora of reasons, from proximity to home, to having friends that attended those schools, and some wanted to follow in the footsteps of their parents.

The participation was spearheaded by the counselors; however, there were several Fannin County High School educators that volunteered as well as some post-secondary administrators who offered assistance.

Dr. Slagle described the student participation in one word, “excellent.”

The Georgia Appalachian Center for Higher Education (Gache) grant helps fund the program.

The program’s success could easily be gauged by variety of post-secondary places that former Fannin students have landed including, Harvard, Stanford and the Air Force Academy.

The top five most popular places for former Fannin students were: 1. Dalton State; 2. North Georgia Tech; 3. Young Harris; 4. North Georgia College; and 5. “The Illustrious” Kennesaw State University.