Whether Close Or Far From Home,

Students Look Forward To College

By Jeff White

As the next few weeks come and go, roughly 250 Newtown residents will leave town. These nest-jumpers will head to every corner of New England and across the country.

Although early June’s commencement exercises helped the Class of 2000 say goodbye to Newtown High School, much of the ensuing weeks have found students playing a waiting game: Waiting for course schedules to arrive in the mail; waiting to meet future roommates; waiting for that day when they can pack up and leave.

Andrea Marciano is simply waiting for a new bedroom.

For the past 18 years, she has called Newtown home, and, as she points out with a laugh, has known only one bedroom. In three weeks’ time, she will head to New York University, a school she says she chose primarily for its location.

Weighing the possibility of the University of Richmond and the College of William and Mary, Andrea concluded that New York’s vibrancy and multitudinous diversions where what she was looking for. “People aren’t always given the opportunity to live in New York City,” she says. “I think that people should live in New York at least once in their lives. This is a good chance for me.”

Andrea has one thing in common with a majority of her classmates: she has chosen to attend college relatively close to home.

If you’re a member of the NHS Class of 2000, New England far and away seems to be the place to go to college. One hundred-nine of them chose to attend college anywhere from the southern tip of Maine to Rhode Island’s shores to the rolling folds of Massachusetts’ Berkshires. Schools like Babson, Bryant, Castleton, and Clark are all represented.

Not surprisingly, the single state that netted the most Newtown students this year was Connecticut, with 55 students attending 15 different schools across the state.

The most popular school for the Class of 2000? The University of Connecticut in Storrs will welcome 23 NHS graduates in the fall.

For Lisa Andrews, going to college at Wesleyan – in Middletown, less than an hour’s drive from Newtown – presents the best of both worlds. She can enjoy the feeling of being on her own, yet she will not be too far from her family should a need arise for a visit home.

“For me, that’s a really good distance, because it’s far enough that I’m not really living at home and with my parents, but I’m close enough that if I need to go home on the weekends, I still have that umbilical cord. I haven’t severed my ties,” she says.

Although many Connecticut colleges and universities offer such a happy medium, the majority of this year’s graduates have opted to go to school out-of-state. Thirty of them are heading to New York, which cast almost as big a net as Connecticut did to attract students. They’re heading to Elmira, Fordham, Hartwick, Hofstra, and Ithaca, to name a few.

Outside of Connecticut, the single school that attracted the most Newtown graduates this year was the University of New Hampshire, where five plan to enroll in the fall.

Schools like New Hampshire’s Keene State and Rhode Island’s Johnson and Wales University also proved Newtown-friendly. Four Newtown students will attend each this coming school year.

In a school system that purports excellence and academic rigor, it is probably not all that surprising that seven schools out of US News and World Report’s top 15 national colleges and universities will welcome Newtown graduates in the fall. Five Newtown students will head to Ivy League schools next year, while other students get ready to leave for such prestigious institutions as Duke, Johns Hopkins, William and Mary, and Northwestern.

Yes, some students are opting to brave greater distances from Newtown by choosing to pack their bags for Evanston, Nashville, and Boulder, Colorado, where Hallie Pierce and Lance Panigutti plan to attend.

Cathleen Byrne is not that concerned about the close to 2,000 miles between Newtown and Centenary College in Louisiana, where she will go to play softball in the fall. “It’s going to be a challenge for the first month or so, but I’m sure I’ll adjust,” she says.

Cathleen admits, however, that she gets jealous when thoughts turn to her friends who will be going to school closer to home. “They can visit each other, whereas I’m a plane ride away.”

A plane ride away is a good way to describe the college choices of both Sam Bergen and Elizabeth Carlson-Bancroft, who will go to college further away from Newtown than anybody else in their class. Elizabeth will begin the fall at San Diego State University, while Sam will enroll at Occidental College, a small liberal arts school also in Southern California.

“Lots of my friends wanted to be within driving distance of home so they could go home on weekends if they wanted to,” Sam explains. “I’ve always imagined myself going away to college. I never thought about staying anywhere near home. That’s the way I’ve always thought of it.”

Indeed, it seems that more than a school’s proximity to home went into the complicated equations each Newtown student used to arrive at his or her school of choice.

According to Josh Stern, who will attend Dartmouth in September, factors like money and academic programs were as important criteria as a school’s driving distance. For Josh, the combination of Dartmouth’s setting and its reputation for fine government courses helped him decide.

“At first I wanted a big city and a big school, then I realized that I’ve been Newtownized,” says the 14 year resident. “I like being able to walk down the street and not worry about things.”

Newtownized, it seems, would describe most of Newtown’s graduates, indeed most anyone who has spent a significant period of time in town and is ready to move on to new places. Whether they chose rural campuses like Bucknell or one of the many universities in big cities like New York and Boston, many members of the Class of 2000 admit they are taking a bit of Newtown with them.

They know that change looms in the next few weeks, and they will have to change to meet it.

“I’m probably going to have to be a little harder, a little smarter,” predicts Andrea Marciano, the student planning on attending New York University. “Living in Newtown, I’m a lot more trusting of people. I’ve really been waiting for a long time to experience something different. I don’t know if I will be shocked, but I think I’m ready.”

And what about Sam Bergen, who stands to have perhaps the biggest adjustment to make, some 3,000 miles from home? “I’m afraid of school, but not really. I know there are 700,000 kids that are going through the same thing. I shouldn’t be afraid to leave my hometown and start a life.”