Allie Neugeboren, Reporter
@alneugiecourant
Kirsten Ostling is a senior athlete at NCHS. She has taken her future into her own hands and left school this year during the third quarter to pursue competitive horse back riding. Currently, Kirsten is participating at the Winter Equestrian Festival in Florida. The horse show has people from all over the world come to compete for money and titles for three months during the winter. Kirsten competes year round to gather points from different competitions that go towards qualifying for the finals that are in the fall.
Assistant Principal, Arri Rothman, is familiar with students leaving school for extracurricular opportunities. “Every year there are always around five students at some high level of athletics who leave for more than three weeks and withdraw from our school,” he said.
Students continue their academic pursuits even when they are out of high school. “The work and transcript produced at these credited tutoring services wherever the student is, travels back to us,” Mr. Rothman said. “If the student has kept up with their work there is no need for summer school and they can graduate that spring.”
Since Kirsten has left NCHS, she has continued her studies in Florida. “I am not actually getting any class or homework directly from my teachers, I am just following the syllabus the school gave me and doing the same curriculum as I would be in New Canaan, but my teachers in Florida create assignments for me,” she said.
Kirsten faces many obstacles, whether it is balancing schoolwork with competition, or leaving her friends and family behind to spend the winter with her six horses. “I’ve learned to manage my time very well. I ride everyday and during the week I leave school and go directly to the barn, ride my horses, go home and then start my homework,” she said.
Kirsten also mentions how she struggles with ordinary senior problems, “First semester of senior year was really hard just with managing college applications and getting through all of the big end of the year horse shows and finals, but I somehow managed to get everything done,” she said.
This is not the first time Kirsten has left school for her riding career. “I’ve been going to Florida in the winter ever since the eighth grade, but this is the first year that I’ve gone down for the whole time. Now that I’m a second semester senior, my family and I decided that it was okay to leave for the whole quarter,” she said.
Kirsten knows she’ll continue in competitive horseback riding through college, but hasn’t decided if she’ll pursue it professionally through the National Collegiate Equestrian Association (NCEA). “I first started gaining interest in horseback riding when I was little and I loved the horses. But then, as I got older, I started to love the competitive side of it all and all the shows that went along with riding,” she said.
