The 2025-2026 school year has officially begun!
Among the thousands of students returning, the class of 2029 is just beginning their Alexandria City High School experience. With new people to meet and opportunities at their fingertips, freshmen are entering the doors of the campus where they will spend their high school years – two campuses, actually.
Last year, ACHS piloted a new system of shuttling students between King St. and the new Minnie Howard campus. The class of 2028 was the first freshman class to experience the constant transitions. How have this year’s freshmen handled these completely foreign procedures? According to some students, they made for a less smooth first day.
“I was so overwhelmed. I had to transfer back and forth [on my first day],” Phoebe Trabb said. “I did not even know how to take the bus. Thankfully my counselor helped fix the constant transitioning, though I still have to do it two or three times a day.”
Freshman who are only scheduled at one campus cannot relate to transitioning challenges, but they have raised issues regarding ACPS buses. In fact, on the first day of high school, freshman Genevieve Kelly said she waited at the bus stop for 30 minutes, only for it never to arrive.
“My parents weren’t home so I had to walk home and ask for a ride from my neighbor,” she said. “I was like 30 minutes late on the first day of school.”
Kelly noted that bussing is a consistent challenge for her. “Getting to school in the mornings has been hard. My bus comes 20 minutes late in the mornings,” she said. “They are always so crowded, too.”
Freshmen are not the only ones affected by bus and transportation difficulties, as students of all grade levels ride the bus to school and transition between campuses. The juniors and seniors, however, had a quite different experience when they entered high school. They attended the old Minnie Howard campus, which served solely ninth graders. That arrangement meant they were surrounded by peers they went to middle school with, and they attended classes with other ninth graders who were also getting acclimated to the high school experience.
Isabel Craine, a senior at ACHS, said the freshman-only campus helped her “transition smoothly into high school.” “Being around people my age made it a little less intimidating,” she said.
Freshmen today will have a much different experience than juniors and seniors did. Junior Molly Atkins added that being a freshman at the Minnie Howard campus now is “more overwhelming because of the amount of people.” She felt that removing what she calls an “adjustment period” in a student’s first year of high school makes it more difficult for freshmen to adapt.
