I am very familiar with the Kansas State school for the deaf which is nearby. Although very few kids are part of their boarding program anymore since they can receive services in their home districts now. Most of the kids are local and part of the deaf community. The Kansas school for the blind closed and merged with the school for the deaf.
The vast majority of parents do. Out of 11 million school aged children, only 66 thousand board. Boarding is very expensive as almost all boarding schools are public schools (which in the UK means private schools, we just like to confuse teh furriners 
).
The UK just has a tradition of the upper-middle classes sending their children to boarding schools. Like Harry Potter! They used to be horrible, but nowadays they are really nice.
Caveat, this is about schools in the UK.
It’s traditionally what the upper classes do to prepare their children for world domination. It isn’t what ordinary working and middle class people do. The vast majority go to local state schools, with some, like myself, going to private day schools.
My private school was all girls. We fraternised with boys from other local boys schools. That’s common with boarding schools too. Sometimes the schools get together to hold parties/balls where the sexes can mingle. Also, many boys boarding schools now admit girls in the 6th form (this is the optional last two years of school you take before going to University, from age 16-18).
I much preferred being at a single sex school to the mixed gender junior school I attended. Boys can be a right pain in classrooms.
For most, it isn’t about not wanting to take an active part, it’s about thinking that boarding school provides to best environment for giving kids a top class education and preparing them to lead independent lives.
They still get to visit and see them in plays and at sports days etc, and some kids only board Monday-Friday. It isn’t prison.
The perceived wisdom is that it generally is - you pay a lot of money for the best teachers. National Exam results tables and university admission rates seem to bear this out.
Some kids go from the age of 7, although these days 11 would be more typical.
Most certainly.
On family tradition - That must be why boarding schools have such big endowments. If you know your grandchildren will go to the same school, I can see you putting it in your will.
I was reading where one, Philips Exeter, has over $1 billion in their endowment fund for a school of 1,000 students, which amounts to over a million dollars a student. Thats why they can give tuition assistance and even free tuition to needy families plus they have 2 hockey rinks on campus.
On their education:
From reading about a couple of school mentioned, they dont “teach to the test” because they do not seem to have any of the normal state exams that public schools take.
They’re still teaching to some test, of course. That’s why the whole “teaching to the test” nonsense is a fake controversy.
I seem to recall that we did have to take some sort of standardized tests mandated by the state of Connecticut, but maybe I’m conflating things. Of course we also took all the usual SATs and whatnot. Wouldn’t be prep school if they didn’t prep you.
In my experience, there are three main types of boarding schools in the United States for kids younger than college age: prep schools, such as those mentioned above, which focus on preparing students for top-notch colleges; military schools, which focus on preparing kids for careers in the armed forces or just on providing unruly boys with a dose of military-style discipline; and residential schools for students with special needs, such as the aforementioned schools for blind, deaf, or emotionally troubled kids.
Boarding prep schools are heavily concentrated in the Northeast, but they exist elsewhere in the United States too. I attended one in northern Ohio, called Western Reserve Academy. I lived in the same town and was a day student, but many of my best friends were boarders, who lived anywhere from 30 miles to several states away. Parents sent their kids there either for a top-flight education (which we got) or because they’d gone themselves and wanted their children to have the same experience.
I grew up in a smallish religion (Christian Science) that had a boarding school for 7th- through 12-graders in St. Louis (and a college across the river in Illinois). My aunt taught drama at the boarding school and my uncle did something administrative; I went to visit them there when I was in 6th grade and desperately wanted to attend the next year. But we were living in Pennsylvania at the time and my mother was dead set against letting me go away to school at the age of 11. A few years later, when we moved to Ohio, my parents made a point of buying a home in the same town as the boarding high school that my uncles had attended as boarders (and that my mom would have attended if it hadn’t been an all-male school at the time). My mother wanted us to have the great quality of education that her brothers had had, but she liked having us at home, so she made sure we lived within walking distance of the school.
Our sports teams played other prep schools, such as Cranbrook near Detroit and a bunch of schools near Cleveland, such as University School, Shadyside Academy, Laurel, and Hathaway Brown. I’m not sure how many of those were boarding schools or strictly day schools.
Oh, and I meant to add that a well-endowed boarding school charging high tuition can offer a world of experiences not available at even some good high schools. For instance, at Western Reserve Academy, we could take up to four years of four different languages (French, Spanish, German, and Latin) as well as advanced placement courses in biology, chemistry, physics, calculus, US and European history, and English. We had the usual array of varsity and JV sports teams, plus some special offerings for upperclassmen. I did tennis, fencing, and “outdoor skills” (rock climbing). The latter isn’t offered anymore, but the school now has a competitive rifle team, which I think is somewhat unusual for high school. Students also had the opportunity to take classes in studio art, theater, public speaking, classical music performance, choral singing, and modern dance.
Those were all of the upsides. The downside (from a student’s point of view) was that they were trying to keep us busy every minute of the day so the boarding students didn’t have time to get into trouble. So we had classes for half a day on Saturdays, compulsory sports for two hours each afternoon, and a ton of homework (three hours a night, as I recall, when I got there as a junior).
But all of that meant that we were exceptionally well prepared for postsecondary education. I went to a small New England college that is generally considered tough and competitive, and I had absolutely no trouble adjusting to the workload, as some of my friends from public high schools did. In fact, my first couple of years at college were less busy than my senior year at prep school had been.
My high school used to have a lot of boarders, among them my father’s eldest brother. By the time my class rolled along, there were a handful left; I’m not sure if there are any now.
My own class group had two boarders: one was from a small village which was quite distant from the nearest HS anyway, and with a relatively high risk of being blocked by snow through much of the winter. He went home most weekends; became part of a group of guys who were all very close and would stay with one or another of them on occasion, including whenever there was a school party and during exam periods.
The other one came for what would be junior year in the US. On the first day he informed us that he’d been sent there for getting into fights for political reasons. We said it seemed like a good reason to send someone to boarding school and that we hoped he’d like it there; we also said we didn’t care what his politics were so long as he wasn’t an ass about it (our class had all kinds of leanings, including some quite exotic ones). He asked who did we fight. We told him nobody, and that going out looking for fights seemed like a perfectly stupid thing to do. He asked a couple more questions, saw we really didn’t give a fig about attitude and that we’d crucify him on the school gates if he made trouble for us, dropped the chip from his shoulders and got along fine with everybody for the next two years. This one was from further away and had very bad public transportation to go home, but once he’d made local friends he’d spend most weekends at the home of a friend or another.
That’s what I’m picking up also.
I wonder if its just the fact that here in the midwest;
- It’s not a tradition. Even people with money send their kids to public schools.
- We have good public and private schools. Whereas in say New York or Boston public schools can be hit or miss.
If your really, really rich you might send your kids to Barstow Academy or Rockhurst which are both college prep schools with long traditions and legacies.
Remember that the fact that there are a lot of boarding schools in New England doesn’t necessarily mean that people in New England are more likely to send their children there than people in the Midwest. They’re boarding schools after all; people send their kids to them from all over the country and all over the world.
Typo Knig (my husband) went to one. In his case, he’d been there for a summer program and liked it; also his family was then living in a town with fairly awful schools. While they moved to another town (for the schools) during his freshman year, they opted to let him stay for the rest of high school.
My cousin sent her oldest child (daughter) to a boarding school; I don’t know the dynamics. It wasn’t any kind of “trouble teen” or “bad local schools” thing, I know.
I am the only one in my family, so far, to go to boarding school. I asked to go. Why? I am not sure, unless the fact that I decided in 4th grade that I wanted to go because I had visited it and I thought it was “soooo cooooool” counts as a reason.
However, there is no doubt that it was the best decision I could’ve made and that my mother decided to indulge. I went on a partial (80%) scholarship for 4 years. I can guarantee that if it were not for Foxcroft that I would likely have not gone to college. I am the only one out of 3 kids in my family to go to college despite the fact that both of my parents went to college. If I hadn’t gone to boarding school, I would’ve gone to at least 2, possibly 3, high schools. Not exactly the recipe for academic success.
Another thing to consider? Boarding school friendships are a whole other level from regular HS friendships. How do I know this? My 20th reunion coincided with the school’s Centennial which meant there were people from every class in attendance. We all knew each other, even if we hadn’t met. We all had stories to share. Because when your school is 150 girls plus or minus, you know everyone in the grades above and below you. You know the girls who graduated the year before you got there because they come back to visit. You know the girls that got there the year after you graduated because you went back to visit. I was MOH in three (yes 3!) weddings of my classmates. And if I got married tomorrow, they would be in my wedding and throwing my bridal shower. College? I talk to 2 or 3 people from then and that is only thanks to the advent of Facebook.
I’m curious. Do you have alumni groups in different cities? Are alumni a good business network?
Also does the school ask for donations alot?
My kids won’t but their parents, grand parents and great grand parents all did.
Consequence of living in the bush.
If you wanted your kids to get a sound education, they went to boarding school.
Hmm, good for networking? It could be. If I had wanted to go into the federal government, health policy or aviation, I can think of 3 guaranteed sources of assistance, references or jobs. The main catch on that front is that our backgrounds and careers were so diverse as to make that harder than at most colleges. If you think of college, most of your friends were in your major, which meant that several had parents in that field as well. Because we were in HS, that was less the case. From my graduating class of 31, we have a pilot, a FBI analyst, a teacher, several working in NGO’s, a couple of SAHM, a financial consultant, a freelance writer and so on. Among their parents? The head of the FAA in the 80s, a minister, a game warden, several oil executives, etc… It is a mixed bag. But I can tell you that when I wrecked my car coming home from college, I called the parents of a HS friend, not college friends, despite having sets of both in the same town.
As for being asked for money, I get a mailing 2 or 3 times a year about the annual fund, but I don’t get the calls and harassment that I get from my college or the university that I went to for grad school.
I didn’t go to boarding school, nor do I know many people who did, but I can recommend “Prep,” by Curtis Sittenfeld, as a really good (fiction) book about a girl from the Midwest who attends a boarding school in the Northeast.
love
yams!!
Good recommendation. I found Prep to be a very accurate representation of the experience, minus the unique central drama. And its a great read.
I’ll have to check it out. thanks.
Here’s a theory: step parents, like what nearly happened in “Sound of Music.”