This year Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy is seeing a massive increase of applicants eager to join the Hill. Shadow Day was completely maxed out, Open House numbers surpassed anything the admissions team could have imagined, and tours for the rest of the year were completely booked.
Most notable has been the increase in attendance at our Open House. In 2022, the school had 244 RSVPs with 199 attending. In 2024, we had a total of 567 RSVPs with 539 attending. That’s a difference of 323 students.
What is the reason for this rise in interest?
“There have been two main enhancements this year. One is the position of adding a social media manager in the marketing department. The other is an investment in admissions which included hiring another staff member who is able to now communicate with all of the inquirers in our inquiry pool,” Ms. Gloria Ventura ‘96, Director of Admission and Enrollment Management, said.
The new FSHA social media manager is Creative Content Specialist Ms. Jocelle Lauron ‘20. The new Assistant Director of Admissions is Ms. Sarah Newhall.
“What Ms. Newhall does is she looks at who has signed up for a tour, for example, and sees if they are in our inquiry pool. Then she’ll reach out to them. And then communicate and add them. And then we send newsletters every two weeks to that group,” Ms. Ventura ‘96 said.
Ms. Lauron, our new Creative Content Specialist, has been tasked with upping FSHA’s social media game.
“Mainly we’ve been focusing on Instagram and TikTok. I think TikTok is pretty untapped in terms of being a resource for private high schools to reach prospective students. I think most students between the ages of 12 and 13 are on TikTok a lot. If we give them content that they enjoy, then I think that’s one of the things that’ll draw them in. So I really like to focus on TikTok, and what I aim for in anything that I do in terms of social media is I want it to be intentional and authentic,” Ms. Lauron ‘20 said.
Is the new emphasis on social media working?
Some prospective students think so.
“I actually saw your guys’ TikToks. They actually came up on my “for you” page so that was really funny. From the videos, it really showed how everyone works together to be proud of the school and to be proud of their school community” said a touring student on Shadow Day.
This positive impression of the school community is further supported by the growth and success in the school’s performance metrics.
“What I really look at is numbers. So I don’t think numbers really lie. I think within my first month or so of being here, all of our metrics are up by thousands of percentage points,” Ms. Lauron ‘20 said.
Building on these impressive numbers, the admissions team is setting goals to expand the school’s reach and attract even more prospective families.
“The admissions office has four main goals for this year and one of them is to increase the number of prospective families, which we have already started to accomplish. We also want to reach out to new schools to make sure we just don’t stay in our area,” Ms. Andrea Rasmussen, Associate Director of Admissions, said.
The admissions office has also implemented innovative ideas such as hosting one Shadow Day instead of three or four, and adding tours for specific departments.
“We have added academic departments specific tours. We added this year an Arts on the Hill, Science on the Hill, and Computer Science on the Hill. So those are new programs that we haven’t had before that are highlighting the strong programs that we offer here,” Ms. Ventura ‘96 said.
While new tours like the ones mentioned above have expanded the opportunities for prospective students, the school has also made adjustments to the Shadow Day experience.
“We reduced it down to one Shadow Day as opposed to three last year. We had three shadow days last year that had about 30 some students in each of them. This year we just did one and we thought we would cap it at 50 and we had the 94 students show up,” Ms. Ventura ‘96 said.
With the current performance on our social media platforms and all the new implementations, the future is bright for Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy.
