A Genuinely Strong School, and a Number Worth Pondering

Memorial Senior High School earns its stellar reputation with an ‘A’ state accountability rating, twenty-six AP courses, and a Gifted & Talented program serving hundreds of students. The school also offers the Project Lead The Way engineering and STEM sequence that most private schools can’t match. Spring Branch ISD has built something special at the corner of Echo Lane and Gaylord, and the Mustangs’ average SAT and ACT scores reflect it.

Here’s the number that matters more than any of those, though, and the one almost no family hears until they’re already living it: roughly four full-time counselors for a student body of about 2,640. That works out to more than 600 students for every counselor, a ratio that puts even an excellent, well-funded public school in an impossible position when it comes to individualized college guidance.

This isn’t criticism of Memorial’s counseling staff, who are, by every account, dedicated and capable people managing an enormous caseload. It’s a math problem. A counselor carrying 600-plus students cannot spend meaningful, consistent, individualized time helping any one of them figure out who they are, what they want, and how to build toward it. By contrast, I spend most of my time on exactly that when working with Memorial families at the Shumsky Center.

Twenty-Six AP Courses Is a Strength Until It’s a Maze

Memorial offers one of the more robust AP catalogs among Houston-area public schools. There is real course depth across the sciences, humanities, and languages. Each year, Memorial students take over a thousand AP exams.

It’s also a lot of options to navigate without personalized guidance. In a school this size, course selection happens largely through a scheduling portal and a single advising conversation squeezed into a packed spring semester. Students often build a schedule based on what their friends are taking, what fits a lunch period, or what a rumor says is ‘the easy AP.’ They do not plan a deliberate, multi-year sequence built around their actual academic strengths and college goals. I regularly meet Memorial juniors who are excellent students yet possess a transcript that, on close inspection, doesn’t tell a coherent story about who they are or what they’re building toward. Nobody ever asked important questions about their goals and plans.

A Big, Diverse Campus Can Be Your Strongest Asset — If You Use It

Memorial’s student body is large and genuinely diverse with a broad mix of backgrounds, family college histories, and life experiences moving through one campus of roughly 2,640 students. Some Memorial families are navigating a multi-generational college legacy; others are sending their first child to college in the family’s history in this country. Both groups sit in the same classrooms.

That range is an asset in the college process, not a complication, but only if a student’s application actually reflects their specific position in it rather than a generic version of ‘hardworking Memorial student.’ A large, comprehensive public school gives a motivated student room to build a genuinely individual academic and extracurricular identity including independent academic research, a self-started initiative, real depth in one area rather than a scattershot list of clubs. Colleges read Memorial applications knowing the school’s size and range; a student who uses that size to stand out, rather than disappear into it, has a real advantage over a student at a smaller school where everyone looks similar on paper.

What the Independent Planning Conversation Actually Adds

Memorial’s counseling office has a team that handles scheduling, transcripts, recommendation logistics, and a genuine amount of one-on-one support within real constraints. Because of the scale, the counseling cannot include: the twelve, fifteen, twenty unhurried hours across two or three years that it takes to help one specific student figure out what they’re actually good at, what they care about, which colleges and majors genuinely fit them, and how to tell that story honestly and specifically in an application.

Families who start that conversation in ninth or tenth grade give their student a coherent, individually-built plan instead of a reactive scramble assembled from whatever advice was available in a rushed and abbreviated meeting.

Why would a Memorial family need an independent college counselor if the school has its own counseling office?

Memorial’s guidance and college counselors manage scheduling and support for hundreds of students each. An independent advisor works exclusively for one family, with the sustained individual time to build a college list, refine essays, and plan a multi-year academic strategy that is difficult for any single school counselor to provide.

We Have Advised Houston Families, Public and Private School Alike, Since 1987

The Shumsky Center has worked with students from Memorial and other Spring Branch ISD campuses alongside families from Houston independent schools across the city for nearly four decades. The work looks different depending on where a student starts. A student who does not receive custom guidance at school needs a different kind of support than one with a dedicated advisor down the hall, yet the underlying goal is the same: a plan built specifically around one student, not a generic template.

I have also worked with Memorial students facing real academic or personal challenges, helping them find colleges and programs suited to who they actually are rather than a plan generated from broad rules of thumb. If your son or daughter is a Mustang and the college process feels like something happening to your family rather than something you’re steering, I’d welcome the conversation.

The Shumsky Center for Academic and Career Performance

4299 San Felipe, Suite 210 | Houston, Texas 77027

713.784.6610 | info@shumskycenter.com | shumskycenter.com

College Admissions Consulting | Career Advising | Learning & Attention Disorders | Residential Placement