- 9% Admission
- Apps up 25%
- Won’t know yield for another few weeks
- Just opened a gorgeous new building, the Gates Rough-House, focused on cross-curricular learning. The school is moving past the AP format, believing that real world problems, as well as success at the most demanding colleges and universities, do not organize themselves according to academic silos. Ain’t that the truth!
- Recommend joining the Thacher Admission Instagram account if you were accepted or thinking about applying. Great tidbits and opinions.
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Missing statistics:
Students removed this year for drugs and/or alcohol. How were they getting it inside the “bubble” – are there more students? Teachers surprisingly on sabbatical this trimester? Administrators turning over and the implications? Teachers leaving at the end of Spring 2021? Results of the internal investigation based on the @rpecultureatthacher account?
But, most importantly, a statistic that can not be quantified, moral at Thacher. Confidence in its first time homegrown Head of School, the unknown future of the Dean of Students, and the schools desire and ability to partner with the parents they work so hard to alienate when the tough does get going and mental health and discipline issues arise.
I think I’ll pass on the opportunity to get into a back-and-forth with you, except to say that most of your innuendo-heavy post is way off base. Also, the new headmaster is fantastic. We love the job that she’s doing.
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@CAboardingparent makes a lot of good points that aren’t addressed by @ThacherParent 's defensive response. The two Instagram accounts, @rpecultureatthacher and @bipocatthacher, were the reasons my kid ended up not applying to Thacher.
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Many boarding schools have BIPOC Instagrams like Thacher’s that decry historical and systemic prejudice, often so ingrained that it’s not even perceived. I favor this bright light being shown on this problem at ANY institution, Thacher included. The important thing is whether the school is taking it seriously and likely to make genuine change, which Thacher is.
As to the other comments about rape, drugs/alcohol, the two kids who withdrew, the “surprise sabbaticals”, the “surprise retirements”, the morale of the school, the new school head, the dean of students…all these comments are either inaccurate or wrongly concluded. Hopefully people coming to this site will note that these posts come from brand new posters and see them for what they are.
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Thanks for the reply back @ThacherParent
I know most other boarding schools had a black@ thread with many similar, heartbreaking points. I was really disheartened at the @rpecultureatthacher Instagram account because I haven’t seen that for other schools. I also have a friend whose daughter had to leave due to an eating disorder. The @rpecultureatthacher mentioned the California skinny blond girl beauty ideal as well as the hook up culture, so that concerned both me and my daughter. Would genuinely like to learn what Thacher is doing to make girls feel safe and valued because I do think Thacher is a great school.
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More than ever these days, you need to read social media with care. Every other year, Thacher participates in the Independent School Gender Project. This group is devoted exclusively to the promotion of equity for women and girls in Independent Schools. Participants include Cate, Deerfield, Groton, Milton, Hotchkiss, St. Paul’s, Thacher and many others. Independent School Gender Project. They run detailed surveys of each school and Thacher has routinely outscored all others for issues of gender equity and building self-confidence among young women. This is an independent survey and includes the students. And, as you know, Thacher’s new School Head is a woman, as is the Student President, as is the head of the horse program etc. It is my strongly held opinion, notwithstanding the rare blip, that Thacher is an incredible place to be a young woman. That was true when my son attended and is even more so today.
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@farmtex007 and @ThacherParent Hi! Sorry to be circling the wagons so late. You are correct, and seem to be close enough to know that the Student Body President is female, but that is because she replaced the male student body president who was removed for drugs/alcohol. These small details aren’t really what I want to be focusing on though, because they can be debated ad nauseam. What’s currently missing, and what we a as family were really looking forward to was a community. We can all get through hard times, transitions, etc. with great leadership and vision. Even after watching the State of the School address, where there were SO many things that could have been celebrated or acknowledged (COVID tests logged, days of in person learning, the opening up of sports and Spring visits, visions for 2021 Fall, etc.) I was left feeling that the work and emotional load of the entire world is left on the shoulders of these students. If I had one specific criticism of Blossom, it would be that she is so busy saving the world, that she can’t see the children at her own doorstep. In the short time we spent around Mully he was engaged, we felt seen, the kids felt seen, people would straighten up and smile.
I would recommend that families that have options explore them for the next few years, while Thacher onboards extensive new faculty and Blossom continues to re-envision its purpose and mission.
I can’t remember, but I believed you challenged my list of new and soon to be replaced positions? I stand by it. We can revisit in July?!
My child is a very recent Thacher graduate (prepandemic) and will have overlapped with your child for 1-2 years. I’d like to share some thoughts regarding your criticisms of the school and our family’s very different, and extremely positive, experience with the school.
First, I am wondering whether you have taken into account the very, very significant impact that the pandemic has had on individuals, communities, and institutions? The large majority of the things you are criticizing Thacher for are things that I have been criticizing my child’s university and my younger child’s day school of, including tuned-out/seemingly absent administration, failure to support students’ mental health challenges, and absence of community. I thought quite highly of both these schools prior to the pandemic. (I also note that you have not appeared to have criticized Thacher until quite late in your child’s academic career.) My suspicion is that our shared criticisms are specific to this time and event (a 14+ month pandemic, the BLM movement, and #MeToo) and that we need to question whether our beliefs are actually well-founded. It must feel like standing on quicksand these days for school administrators, who are trying to get and keep kids in-person on campus, dealing with legacy issues that go back decades, and forging a better path forward.
Secondly, have you spoke with other parents in the class as to whether they have similar concerns? How a parent views a school is largely a function of their child’s individual experience at the school, unless they have had multiple children attend. We know several families with kids in your child’s class and they have had a very different experience, as have their kids. Certainly not perfect, but very, very different from yours. Also, we have many friends who have children at Cate and while it is also a phenomenal school, its students also struggle with the same issues you have discussed in this forum. My point being that these issues are not specific to Thacher, but common to all teenagers at competitive boarding schools, and are not necessarily something within the power of a school to solve.
Finally, I think it’s worth considering that we parents often assign causation for our children’s behavior on their school experience when it’s misplaced. A friend was recently discussing how unhappy her child had become with school during the pandemic and was blaming the school’s response. I reminded her that almost every kid in that grade (8th) had the same experience pre-pandemic and that it was largely a function of age and the fact that it was time for the kids to move on to high school after nine years at the same school.
I think the same applies to Thacher. Teenagers will have teenage issues regardless of the school they attend. Similarly, after four years at a small school, 18 year olds will be chomping at the bit (especially after the pandemic) to move on and live very different lives. My child had an amazing, though certainly not perfect, experience at Thacher and wants their siblings and their own children to attend the school also. To me that is the best testament to the nature of the school.
Finally, I will absolutely concede your point that Thacher does not feel especially welcoming to new families, nor does it seem to care to make parents feel part of the community. It was most definitely a “we’ve got this now” attitude without much consideration given to the fact that parents should be better informed and allowed more involvement in their children’s lives and academics. I find it incredibly odd that we were not allowed parent/teacher meetings, didn’t receive communications from teachers, and that there is no parents association. While there were parent representatives for the classes, they seemed only to serve a development function. It didn’t help that we weren’t alumni ourselves and that this was our first child to attend the school. As a result, it seemed to us that most parents understood a lot more about what was going on there and didn’t feel so left out of the experience.
That issue aside, we were thrilled to have our child attend Thacher and hope to have siblings attend there in the future.
@Kthor626, our son is doing well and happy at Thacher but I know of other students (both in his grade and not) who are struggling mightily. I am hoping for a Thacher where all students have an excellent experience.
Sometimes in moments like this it’s hard to see the forest for the trees. Think of the senior class; my heart goes out to them. Fires, BIPOC, MeToo, the pandemic, a new head and the positively insane uptick in college applicants this year - all in the same rough time frame! It’s enough to test the thickest skin. Realistically, I don’t think it’s possible for every single kid to have an “excellent experience,” but that should certainly be the goal - and I believe with all my heart that it is.
The measure of a great school is not the portraits of famous alumni lining hallways, or earnest quotes carved in marble etc. Greatness is measured in a school’s willingness to see itself as a work in progress. It’s measured in its constant struggle to get better and better, even when that means moments of hard self-reflection and even harder change. This is what drew us to Thacher. We wanted to be associated with a school that saw itself this way.
Thacher was and remains family to us. It represents the best education dollars that we have ever spent. It is an extraordinary School unlike any other that we know. Perfect? No. To steal a quote from Good Will Hunting:
“You’re not perfect, sport, and let me save you the suspense: this girl you’ve met, she’s not perfect either. But the question is whether or not you’re perfect for each other.”
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