Nearly 85 percent of the senior class moves on to four-year colleges each year, and an average of about 8 percent of those attend Ivy League schools, according to district officials. Students here are consistently among the top scorers in college entrance exams and state proficiency tests. There are so many high-achievers at the school that class rank was eliminated in the early 1990s because district officials felt it would hurt admission to prestigious colleges. The A students are the role models, and there's peer pressure to perform well at school. This year, that student is Meena Ramachandran, who has been accepted to Brown and MIT and is awaiting word from Stanford.
All students are pretty intelligent.
She was captain of the cross-country team this year, an editor on the yearbook and newspaper staffs. She also formed a chapter of Future Business Leaders of America at her school and has been volunteering at Bayshore Community Hospital in Holmdel for five years. We're focused on what raises academic achievement. The academic focus starts early. At that same school, the library and the two computer labs are wired with the latest Macintosh models, and every classroom is equipped with at least one computer.