<p>Hardstyleprep, I wish you and your daughter well. As for the list of top schools , I want to make it clear that my choices are by no means the only schools that are worthwhile. As an examle, Iam intrigued by epcopal n Va. and itis on my 7th grade daughters list of shools to look at. I also that many prospective students get so caught up in "ten schools", and the "ISL", that they miss some very, very good schools that are part of the MAPL such as Peddie, Lville, The hill, Mercersburgh, and Blair.I realize that the hill and Lvlle are part of the ten schools but I was primarily reering to the other schools in the MAPL that I mentioned on this post.</p>
<p>What did you guys think abouth the article Curtis Sittenfeld , the author of PREP,wrote to the NY times the other day about boarding school? I was somewhat surprised and thought her reasoning was odd.</p>
<p>catg, I did not read the article. I sure will track it down to see what she has to say. catg, are you a prospective student, parent, or? Please stay with us throughout the process.</p>
<p>I think that day schools are your best bet in Ohio. For girls check out Hathaway brown in Cleveland area and Columbus School for Girls in Columbus.
Also in Columbus, Columbus Academy and the Wellington School</p>
<p>The girls schools are the strongest with very small classes and excellent college admissions records.</p>
<p>I'm a parent with friends that have kids at most of the top schools. i also have one that may apply this year or next. I have to admit I am totally intrigued with B schools. i would have loved to have had the experience. I find them so mmuch more interesting than college.</p>
<p>Thanks for the info catg. What schools do you think your child would be a good fit best ?</p>
<p>catg, I was unable to locate the curtis sittenfeld article you mentioned. What surprised you about the article?</p>
<p>I don't know how people can possibly tell what would be a good fit as thess kids change so much over the years. That said, We will probably look at mid-size schools as we are at a small school now. A & E seem a little too much like the college experience also. I like L'ville but don't want my d too close to NY for obvious reasons. SPS and Deerfield would be first choices at this point.</p>
<p>If anyone is interested, there are a few good prep schools in HI. The two that are best known are Punahou & Iolani. Also, there is MidPacific Institute (which has an IB program), Saint Andrews's Priory (all girl's), & Hawaii Preparatory Academy (boarding). There are other private high schools as well; most also require SSAT for applications.</p>
<p>Back to the article, do a search at nyt online. I think it was sept 7. What surprised me was the fact she thought boarding school was unnecessary and couldn't understand why someone would want to do it. She mentioned elitism, being around kids all day,etc. I found the arguments weak. There are also 5 letters to the editor disagreeing with her points.</p>
<p>Himom, thanks so much for the info on HI. schools. This is certainly a first. ESA, how is SPS, you may not recal, but I told you you would end up at SPS. Tell us how it's going. Any surprises, or ?</p>
<p>Why Boarding School Was Right for Me (5 Letters)
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Published: September 12, 2005
To the Editor:</p>
<p>In "Parental Supervision Required" (Op-Ed, Sept. 7), Curtis Sittenfeld says boarding schools ratchet up the pressures of teenage life and breed snobbishness and entitlement. But my own experience was that having students live together in dorms somewhat ameliorated the cliquishness that seems so pervasive and harrowing in other high schools.</p>
<p>Not having parents present through every stage of the college application process is surely a blessing to many students. And anyone seeking snobbishness and obscene displays of wealth need look no further than private day schools and upscale public schools. </p>
<p>Boarding schools are far from perfect, but blame for the excesses of overprivileged youth can hardly be laid at their wrought-iron gates.</p>
<p>Anthony Lin
New York, Sept. 7, 2005</p>
<p> </p>
<p>To the Editor:</p>
<p>Curtis Sittenfeld says boarding school "makes the things that already loom large in high school - grades, clothes, sports, heartache, acne - loom even larger."</p>
<p>As a graduate of a single-sex boarding school, the Emma Willard School, I disagree. Compared with my friends in public schools and co-ed private schools, we thought less about boys, clothes and our physical appearance. Dressing in sweatpants and wearing no make-up were common; the environment was supportive and noncompetitive. </p>
<p>Many of my fellow alumnae agree that there couldn't have been a more healthy environment for our teenage years. </p>
<p>Jennine Shohan Pommier
Summit, N.J., Sept. 7, 2005</p>
<p> </p>
<p>To the Editor:</p>
<p>Yes, as the headline says, "Parental Supervision Required." That idea has been compromised since the late 60's, when adults seemed to lose confidence.</p>
<p>While today's parents want to ensure their children's safety, along with their education (academic, aesthetic, ethical, emotional and spiritual), boarding schools are also committed to those goals. In boarding schools, a kind of utopian community can be fostered, where the learning, with its rigor and ritual, underpinned by the values of safety, integrity and trustworthiness, is lived out day to day. </p>
<p>At a time when most parents work and traditional carriers of values, like churches and neighborhoods, are no longer so reliable, boarding schools offer young people a moral and intellectual context, not to mention friendships, to serve them all their lives.</p>
<p>M. Burch Tracy Ford
Head of School, Miss Porter's School
Farmington, Conn., Sept. 7, 2005</p>
<p> </p>
<p>To the Editor:</p>
<p>Curtis Sittenfeld vows that she will not send her future children to boarding school. But when half of all marriages end in divorce, how can she know what the future will bring? Or whether her eventual teenager might not welcome a respite from the emotional pressure cooker that typifies the American family today?</p>
<p>As for being the witness to strife between parents, or a single parent's search for a mate, the adolescent has enough inner turmoil without daily exposure to the adult variety.</p>
<p>Ms. Sittenfeld mentions Groton (my late husband's alma mater) and Choate Rosemary Hall (my own). We adored our schools and sent our four children to boarding school. Half of them did the same. My point is that both kinds of schools are still needed. </p>
<p>June Bingham
Bronx, Sept. 7, 2005</p>
<p> </p>
<p>To the Editor:</p>
<p>Curtis Sittenfeld's article generated many conversations with my former boarding school students. These women believe that boarding school transformed their lives. As a fourth-generation educator from a working-class family, I identify with their passion for transformation. </p>
<p>We have learned the true lessons of boarding school: the equal playing field and a respect for difference. </p>
<p>Our country's schoolchildren are desperately in need of schools that work, less finger-pointing, more bridge-building, compromise, partnership and school choices. </p>
<p>Mary Louise Leipheimer
Head of School, Foxcroft School
Middleburg, Va., Sept. 8, 2005</p>
<p>September 7, 2005
Parental Supervision Required
By CURTIS SITTENFELD
Philadelphia</p>
<p>IN 1989, when I was 13 and living in Cincinnati, I waged a one-girl campaign to persuade my mother and father to let me attend Groton School in Massachusetts. Despite my parents' ambivalence about boarding school, they ultimately acquiesced, I went, and I received a very good education - not all of it academic. More than a decade later, I couldn't resist setting my first novel at a boarding school. Now at readings, I'm asked if I'd send my own child away to school, and I say no.</p>
<p>My naked hypocrisy isn't the only reason I feel apologetic in these moments. It's also because the person who asks the question usually is middle-aged and gives off a certain preppy whiff - perhaps he's wearing seersucker pants, or maybe her voice has that assured, WASP-y thickness - and it seems highly likely that my questioner already is or soon will be a boarding-school parent.</p>
<p>But it turns out I'm not alone: an increasing number of parents are deciding against boarding school. Enrollment at private day schools has grown 15 percent in the past decade, while enrollment at boarding schools has grown only 2.7 percent. Overall boarding school enrollment dropped from about 42,000 in the late 1960's to 39,000 in the last school year - even though, according to the Census Bureau, the population of 14- to 17-year-olds was more than 1.5 million higher in 2004 than in 1968.</p>
<p>Reporting on this, The Wall Street Journal attributed the shift away from boarding school to a trend of greater parental involvement, which translates into parents reluctant to be apart from their children. This is, evidently, the same reason some parents are now accompanying their teenagers to boarding school; these mothers and fathers literally move, sometimes cross-country, to be close to the campuses of the boarding schools their children attend.</p>
<p>While the new breed of super-involved parent strikes me as slightly creepy (having worked as a private-school teacher, I've also seen parents whose idea of "involvement" is doing their children's homework for them), I don't think the conclusion they've come to is the wrong one. Among the reasons I wouldn't send my own child to boarding school is that being around one's adolescent peers 24 hours a day doesn't seem particularly healthy. It makes the things that already loom large in high school - grades, clothes, sports, heartache, acne - loom even larger. </p>
<p>Going home at night provides physical distance from the relentlessness of all teenagers, all the time, and, ideally, parents provide perspective. Although they might be dorky, parents know an important lesson about everything from serious hazing to the embarrassment of dropping a lunch tray in a crowded cafeteria: This, too, shall pass.</p>
<p>Certainly teachers provide an adult perspective at boarding schools, but it's a very unusual teacher who influences an adolescent as much as the average parent does. Furthermore, while many boarding school teachers knock themselves out on students' behalf not just by teaching but also by coaching and running dorms, they're undermined by lesser teachers who, rather than guiding students out of teenage pettiness, seem themselves to get sucked down into it. There is on every boarding school campus some variation on the doofus teacher who, if he's not actually buying beer to ingratiate himself with the popular senior guys, sure seems to wish he could.</p>
<p>The self-containment of boarding schools can create terrariums of privilege in which students develop a skewed sense of money and have a hard time remembering that, in fact, it is not normal to go skiing in Switzerland just because it's March, or to receive an S.U.V. in celebration of one's 16th birthday. At, for example, Choate Rosemary Hall - one of many boarding schools starting classes this or next week - room, board and tuition for 2005-2006 is $35,360. If, as Choate's Web site explains, 27 percent of students receive financial aid, that means the other 73 percent come from families that are, by just about any standards except perhaps their own, very rich. Even when these schools hold chapel services espousing humility and service to others, it's the campus facilities - the gleaming multimillion-dollar gymnasium, say - that can send a louder message.</p>
<p>It's hard not to wonder: in a world of horrifying inequities, at what point do these lavishly maintained campuses go from enriching and bucolic to just obscene? Can a student living on such a campus be blamed if, logically working backward, she starts to think her access to such bounty must exist because she deserves it? It is this line of thought, I suspect, that gives rise to the noxious attitude of entitlement and snobbishness that is simultaneously less common than pop-culture depictions of boarding school would have you believe and also not that hard to find.</p>
<p>FOR me, the question isn't why parents wouldn't send a child to boarding school as much as why they would. Unless there are either severe problems at home or flat-out terrible local schools, I don't see the point. Even in the case of terrible schools, I'm not convinced that parents can't significantly augment their children's education. Among the advantages of boarding school are opportunities for independence, academic stimulation, small classes, peer companionship and the aforementioned campus beauty - but every single one of these opportunities is available at dozens of liberal arts colleges, so why not just wait a few years until the student will better appreciate such gifts and save $140,000? Besides, then there's no risk of college feeling anticlimactic, as it can for boarding school graduates.</p>
<p>Of course, none of this is what I thought when I was 13. I thought then, and I still think, that boarding school seemed interesting. It's a place where bright, talented adolescents rub up against each other figuratively and literally. Our culture is fascinated by the rich and the young, and elite boarding schools are a place where the two intersect. That doesn't mean you'll automatically be better off if you attend one, but it does make it unsurprising that they've retained a hold in the popular imagination.</p>
<p>It's not that I see boarding schools as evil. I just don't see them as necessary, and despite their often self-congratulatory rhetoric, I don't see them as noble - certainly no more so than public schools. At the same time, I recognize the hubris in declaring how I'll raise my as-yet-nonexistent children, and probably nothing makes it likelier that I will send them to boarding school than publicly vowing I won't. I'm not planning on it, but life is hard to predict and perhaps at a parents' weekend 20 years from now, standing on the sidelines of a verdant lacrosse field, I'll be the one wearing seersucker.</p>
<p>Curtis Sittenfeld is the author of the novel "Prep."</p>
<p>Hey guys, good luck with the prep school admissions process. I applied to Andover and Brooks last year. I had 1 92nd percentile SSAT, good recs/interview, but my 7th grade werent great, a lot of B's....I was waitlisted at both. My biggest advice is that they care most about grades, so work hard in school! And on essays....dont overthink them, just talk about what you're passionate about (politics, extracurricular interests?) and let your personality come through. Interviews: Dont be nervous. Its not an interrogation, just be ready to talk about your interests, favorite book, aspirations, favorite class, and have questions about the school prepared in advance(i.e. How is the theatre program?) And lastly, if you're not accepted, mind you that its not the end of the world, not even close. I am now attending an excellent, Catholic day school and I am sure I will still get a top notch education and go to a terrific college. GOOD LUCK.</p>
<p>Green Day Fan Your comments/ observations will many prospective prep students. I think it was paleo who said it best on last years thread The schools are building communities, so it seems sometimes you are well qualified and it doesn't work out.
Hardstyleprep Thanks so much!</p>
<p>Tell us how your son is getting along at Blair. I believe Blair is where he ended up at, is that correct?</p>
<p>When our d approached us with the idea of bs school, we said "yeah right". She is currently in her 2nd year of bs and absolutely loves it. I would like a response from all as to why you chose bs. Parents, students, grads of bs, all of you, what did you expect to get out of bs? Was it ivy matric, perception of a better education, prestige, etc?</p>
<p>Blair is awesome. I can't speak highly enough about it. It is a small, nurturing community with a range of kids. The faculty opens their homes to the students and the learning opportunities never end. S is a senior this year- started at Blair as a junior. Blair is a wrestling powerhouse (S is not a wrestler) and has strong teams in a number of other sports, too. College counseling staff is great.</p>
<p>Is anyone considering Middlesex? Any coments?</p>