Hi moms! Thank you for joining me today.

Today is going to be an idea day. I want to share something really, really cool with you, but before I begin I promised that I would have a review of the week.

So this one comes from my friend, Taryn. Thank you Taryn for taking the time to leave me a review, even though you’re probably very biased. She says, “I’m a mom of three and a huge fan of Heather Anderson. I have experienced her expertise firsthand as all three of my babies have gone to her preschool. She is loving, kind, patient, and such a wonderful teacher. I am so excited to finally be her student and apply what she has learned. I cannot wait for this journey and a new chapter of motherhood.” Thank you so much, Taryn, for your kind words, and if any of you listeners would like to be the review of the week please go on iTunes or Apple Podcasts and leave me a rating and review. These really do help so, so much. And, as you know, I do this podcast completely for free, with no sponsors at all whatsoever–it’s those ratings and reviews that really help me out.

Okay, so today I wanted to share something with you that might change your high school students’ life. It did with mine. And if you’re thinking, “Well I don’t have a high school student yet,” keep listening because you’re going to want to know this information in the coming future. Or if you are passed that stage, please share this with someone you know who does have a middle school or high school child. This is just too great not to share.

You know how there seems to be people around you talking about how their child is getting college credits while in high school, and you just feel like you’re missing something, like everyone knows something that you don’t. And you keep waiting for someone or even the high school to tell you how it’s done, but no one ever really explains it to you, and before you know it your child is halfway through their junior year and you all-of-a-sudden remember you were supposed to look into that thing and how to do, it but now you feel like you just missed the boat.

Yeah well, that was me with my first child. I think I thought that when it was time the high school would give me all the information and tell me how to do it, but for some reason a lot of the high schools kind of keep quiet about this whole thing.

Or, like the one I dealt with quite a bit, they seemed to hide the information and not make it super readily available to everyone. In fact, they recently sent out an email to parents of sophomores, I think, and it was kind of hidden in an obscure link at the bottom of an email with lots of other information. And this link was to a video and in this video it shows just one way, the high school’s way, of how your child might be able to get just a few classes at the local community college.

And of course they always have the option of the AP classes, but don’t even get me started on those. The workload is humongous and it’s this huge risk because they have to pass the test at the end in order to even get the college credits, otherwise it was all for nothing.

So the high schools, when they do give you information, are just pigeonholing you into a couple different options; but not giving you all of your options. And I really don’t understand this, I don’t know why that is, I don’t know why the schools aren’t more forthcoming with all of the options that are out there because there are quite a few. You would think that they would want you to be able to help your child get a great head start on their future. But it’s like if the parent doesn’t know what they’re doing, or exactly how to go about doing it, the high school just streamlines everybody into just this one way.

But I have happened to learn firsthand that if you arm yourself with a bunch of knowledge, the school will work with you and do what you ask. I wish I would’ve known with my first child what I know now, because even though he wasn’t the best student, he could’ve benefited from the option that I want to share with you.

You don’t need to have a straight A student in order to get them some college credits in high school. Most students can do this method with just a 2.0, and now that I have spent so many hours figuring out the system and talking to guidance counselors, community colleges, universities, and high schools, I have developed my own method on how to get high school students college credits without having them change schools or add more hours to their workload. I have helped my own children, as well as many other high school students, to do this. And like I said, these aren’t straight A top students, well some of them are, but most of them are just average students who are now thriving in their online college classes.

Let me give you the example of my daughter. She’s a senior this year and about to go off to college in the fall. I don’t really like this whole stage of kids leaving the nest, it’s really painful, but that’s another topic for another day. I figured out all of this college credits in high school thing when she was going into her junior year.

Now, the local high school says that by junior year you’re pretty much too late to the game, and only can take a couple college classes if there’s room after the sophomores filled them up. But after all my research, I finally asked the right questions to a guidance counselor friend of mine–I want to give a shout out to Mr. Joshua Hays. He totally changed so many lives by giving me the information that I needed to kind of put the last puzzle piece into place. In a meeting with him one day I said, “Can this be done for students who are in the brick and mortar high schools too, or does this only work with home school or charter school students?” He said, “Oh this works for everyone, you just have to know what you’re doing when you go into the counselor to revamp everything that they have planned for your child.”

So that very week, I marched myself into the high school and changed my daughter’s high school trajectory completely. She graduated a semester early, which wasn’t really the draw with all of this, but with Covid and everything it was kind of a bonus. And she didn’t need to graduate early if she didn’t want to, but with all of the college class taking which count for double high school credits, she had high school credits coming out of her ears, so we just decided to just have her be done with high school. And she was able to get a job, a couple jobs, and start building her résumé, in the time that it would’ve taken her to complete her senior year.

So with her only taking a summer school class here and there, and only one, or sometimes two, college classes a semester she’s going into a university next year with a whole year of college under her belt.

And it also saved us thousands of dollars, because I’m lucky because California high schools have a deal with the community colleges where they can take classes tuition-free. I know that’s not the case everywhere, but no matter where you are, community college classes are much much less expensive than at the University. So if you can just get your child into some college classes while in high school, you are making so many things work in your favor.

Anyway, my daughter just thrived in these classes. She did so well. Yes, the first one was very nerve-racking for her and I did have to support her academically a lot through it. It was kind of a training class. But once she got a B in that class, which counted as an A for the high school because they weighted it, therefore also boosting her GPA too, I watched her confidence grow so much.

She now just takes each class, each assignment, each quiz, and essay in stride. She isn’t worried about it at all anymore. She’s become very organized, and I can’t help but think how cool it is that on top of all the other benefits of what taking these college classes in high school have done for her and us, she also is confident going into college next year. She knows how to work, knows how to learn about what each teacher expects from her, and knows she can do it. And if I was to ask her, I bet she’ll say that it surprisingly wasn’t even that bad.

Now onto my next child. Since I knew everything by the time he was a freshman, I was able to start him in his first college class the summer before his 10th grade year. He’s now going to graduate a year early, because he wants to, but he could stay at the high school and just dabble in fun classes if he wanted, because he’s not allowed to leave home yet anyway. I’m not letting him leave early just cause he’s graduating early. But he will graduate a year early and he will continue to take a few classes, and by the time he goes off to a university he will have two years of college under his belt. And the best part of it, for him, is that he didn’t have a really great freshman year grades-wise. He didn’t do horrible, but he just didn’t get the grades to get into a competitive university like he had wanted to. But now with this, the best part is that he will have enough credits to be able to apply to the universities as a transfer student, therefore boosting his chances of getting in where he wants to go, even though we thought those chances were gone with his freshman year grades.

Because as a transfer student, the universities won’t look at his high school grades, or his ACT score, or anything like that. And they really like and accept transfer students more often than incoming freshmen. These universities really like that a student has already proven themselves as being able to handle college classes, versus taking a chance on a high school graduate that might not be able to handle the college classes.

So I have had so many people reach out to me, because my other full-time job right now is an educational specialist for a charter school, and they want me to teach them about how to go about doing all of this. And I have guided so many high school students through my method. But I ran out of time to be able to sit down and explain it to each family, and I felt like all my mom listeners would appreciate knowing this information too, so I created a free workshop to give you an introduction to all of the stuff I’m talking about.

If you’re interested in attending my free workshop, please go to the show notes and click on the link in there. That will take you to the registration page to save your seat.

Thanks for listening today and I hope to see you in there.