With the beginning of the 2023-2024 school year comes a plethora of changes to LZHS, including the implementation of SchooLinks, a new college and career readiness platform.

“SchooLinks is a comprehensive college and career readiness platform that offers resources for [K-12] students,” Ali Finn, Director of College and Career Readiness, said. “It aims to prepare students for their future careers or post-secondary education through a variety of tools. It provides academic planning, college search, course planning, and financial literacy tools, among others.”

When first logging into SchooLinks, students are given the “Find Your Path” test, an MBTI personality test used to recommend “Career Clusters” like education and training, or agriculture, food, and natural resources. These Career Clusters then branch into specific careers, such as historical study or clergy and religious teaching. Students are then given suggestions for possible majors, careers, and colleges based on their chosen Career Cluster.

Besides their MBTI test, SchooLinks offers numerous other activities and assessments that focus on college and career readiness. One notable example is the “Game of Life,” which calculates the salary of your chosen career keeping factors such as student loans and cost of living in mind.

Some of SchooLinks’ other features include tracking a student’s grades and test scores, which include the PSAT, SAT, AP, etc. It also displays a district’s course offerings, similar to LZHS’ Program of Studies. SchooLinks can then record your chosen courses into a transcript that can eventually be sent to colleges and universities.

Another one of SchooLinks features is its “Career Center,” a database that provides a career salary by state, as well as information on a specific career, with a page dedicated to each one containing a general overview as well as more detailed information like educational requirements and answers to common questions regarding the career.

SchooLinks also has “School Search,” another database that gives students information on different colleges and universities, like admission rates, costs, athletics, etc. Students can favorite preferred colleges and calculate the probability of being accepted into a college based on a student’s given data concerning their educational and career goals.

Along with its college and career-centered parts, SchooLinks’ other features include communicating with counselors and teachers via the site’s messaging system, browsing for scholarships, and finding job opportunities through a database of employers.

“I think that SchooLinks is an innovative platform that will simplify and personalize the college and career readiness process,” Finn said. “Its comprehensive set of tools and ease of use could make it a valuable resource for students, parents, and educators. It will help our students to become college and career-ready and our staff to become leaders in future readiness preparation.”