Three Weeks In
It’s only been three weeks since Term I started, and already one of our freshmen can point to the exact moment LHS stopped feeling new.
It wasn’t the first day. It wasn’t orientation. It was smaller than that — a hallway conversation between classes, a Flextime study group that turned into something more than homework, a chapel service where the person next to them already knew their name. As Homecoming Week approaches (September 27–October 2), we asked two of our newest Cougars to put that moment into words:
“Lutheran High is so inclusive. After only a month here, I’ve made so many new friends, and everyone treats everyone like family.”
— Khloe Brown, Class of 2030
“Everyone at Lutheran High has made me feel so welcome and included. I didn’t always fit in at my last school, but LHS has so many clubs and other opportunities that I easily found my place and my people. I feel so accepted here!”
— Jaida Hamilton, Class of 2030
Not an Isolated Story
We hear some version of this story every fall, and it’s rarely from the students you’d expect. It’s not always the outgoing kid who joins three clubs in the first week. Sometimes it’s the freshman who wasn’t sure they’d know anyone, or who transferred in without a single familiar face in the hallway.
Take last year’s freshman class. One student told us their moment came during a “Cougar Connect” block, when an upperclassman they’d never met sat down, unprompted, and asked how their first week was going. Another pointed to chapel — not a big program, just the ordinary rhythm of sitting in the same seat every Wednesday until it stopped feeling like a stranger’s seat. A third said it was a teacher who learned their name before the second day of school and used it every time they passed in the hall.
Different students, different moments, same pattern. That’s not a coincidence. It’s the result of things we build on purpose: STUCO’s Freshman Welcome efforts during the first weeks of school, upperclassmen who are asked — and expected — to notice new faces, Flextime built with enough flexibility for real conversations to happen, and a chapel schedule that puts the same students in the same room, week after week, until familiarity turns into friendship.
Known By Name, Not Just a Name on a Roster
For those of us who work in admissions and student life, this is the story we hope every family gets to live out. It’s one thing to tour a school and hear about community. It’s another to be three weeks into ninth grade and already feel like someone would notice if you weren’t there.
That’s not an accident. It’s Authentic Relationships in practice — a new student being known by name within weeks, not months. Whether it happens in a hallway, a Flextime group, or a chapel pew, that’s the kind of moment that tells a student, and eventually a parent, that this is a place where they belong.
Why We’re Sharing This Now
Homecoming Week is one of the most visible weeks on our calendar — spirit days, the parade, the football game, the dance, all of it. It’s easy from the outside to see Homecoming as the story: the banners, the school colors, the noise. But underneath all of that is the story we most want prospective families to understand. Homecoming works, and means something, because of the everyday relationships already in place long before the first spirit day. You can’t manufacture that kind of belonging in a single week. It’s built three weeks in, one hallway conversation at a time, so that by the time Homecoming arrives, it’s a celebration of something real rather than an attempt to create it.
If you’re a family with a student in grades 6-8 and wondering what daily life at LHS actually feels like, stories like these are the clearest answer we can give you. Not a brochure description of “community,” but an actual freshman, three weeks in, who can already name the moment it stopped feeling new.
See It for Yourself
Want to know if your student would feel the same way? Come find out.
Schedule a shadow day and let your student experience a real day at LHS, hallway conversations and all.
Explore Student Life to see more of what makes moments like this possible.
Mr. Micah Braddy & Mrs. Marie Branneky
STUCO Sponsors
