<p>education1st- did you give feedback to the Admissions office?- this is information that they should have!</p>
<p>I have a daughter at Miss Porter’s. Parents can DM me with questions.</p>
<p>Strongly recommend Miss. Porter’s School!</p>
<p>My sister currently attends Miss Porters, I’ve visited and it’s quite nice. We visited Linden Hall and it’s honestly not as good, we’d definitely recommend Porters’. She had an academic consultant that worked with her and apparently the reason they take a lot of international students is because they aren’t able to get as much as they would like from this country. We were talking to a girl that went there and she had encountered a surprising amount of bullying there. Porter’s has better academics overall and our family would definitely recommend it. My sis also strongly considered Dana Hall, it was also a very nice place. </p>
<p>Not trying to trash Linden Hall, but that’s just what we’ve heard.</p>
<p>My d is considering an all girls boarding school for next September. She really loves the school (Emma Willard), but can’t decide if she should leave her already great private day school. Anyone with experience with this? I’d love some advice!</p>
<p>Thanks!</p>
<p>Hockaday has the best acceptance levels among the top 10 schools of any girls school in the country. Since they are primarily a day school (K - 12), they naturally load up on local Dallas girls through 8th grade; afterwards, the boarders include a smattering of US girls, but the vast majority are Indian, Chinese, and Korean. If you are a non-Texas US girl, they would probably bend backwards to see if they can take you. Hockaday girls socialize with the local boys schools, so there is always a social life for boarders.</p>
<p>Don’t go to Miss Porters! Everything you have read about it in the press is true. They are totally unsupportive and there is a mean energy among the admin. My D went to a counselor there who then went and broke confidentiality and told the whole admin what my D said in a private session. Unbelievable.</p>
<p>I am a current student at Emma Willard school (will be a junior in the fall) and I’d say it is absolutely worth going. Boarding school is an incredible experience that will surely change you as a person for the better. (it did for me!) I think Emma is special because you are surrounded by a diverse group of hard working, smart, amazing girls from all over the world. Feel free to message me with any questions about Emma, I’d be happy to answer!</p>
<p>Consider the % of boarding vs. day. I would be leery of having child board at a school that is overwhelmingly comprised of day students-- it could mean very lonely evenings & weekends.</p>
<p>Any Dana Hall students/parents here?</p>
<p>The Boarding vs Day percentage is really important. My daughter looked at a school (Girls’ school) in Maryland which was perfect in every way…on paper. It had literally everything she wanted and she knew the girls there from sports as well as the coaches, spent two summers there in camp and everything. She practically had her bags packed. But they had an overnight visit program, and my daughter saw how tiny the boarding population was. The school was almost two separate schools, since there was a K-12 generic predominantly white upper middle class day population and a super rich Chinese/Korean high school boarding population. The headmaster seemed gleeful when he announced that the international students “could buy and sell all of us.” I thought that was an obnoxious comment to make to prospectives. After the night, my daughter said she never felt so lonely, and she is an extremely outgoing girl. The number of boarders you could count on your hands. I had asked how many kids board and never got a straight answer–“all of our students board at some point,” they said. DEFINITELY insist on the number and get the story on the internationals.</p>
<p>HI Parker Mom- I’d like to speak with you about Hockaday / Exeter- but I am pretty new to the forum and can’t PM yet. Can you contact me via email? cbra2@********
sharon</p>
<p>I have a daughter who’s a freshman at Emma. She is deliriously happy there. It was the ONLY girls’ school we considered, and that only because so many people recommended it. Our daughter was accepted at Exeter, Concord, and Blair but chose Emma. She has not regretted it and I can say that she is finally in an environment that is diverse, supportive, challenging… all we’d hoped for. </p>
<p>One of her comments to me about the foreign students, and in particular the Asian students, was that at Emma (as the school is affectionately known), they are so much more integrated into the community than they were at her former school, where the Asian students wanted nothing to do with the general school community. Since Emma also is one of the few schools in the country with FA for international students, not all of them are wealthy (though there certainly are plenty of wealthy students both domestic and international, as there are in all boarding schools). She hasn’t found any social barriers based on income or background.</p>
<p>As a parent, I can say that every time I step onto the campus, I am impressed by the diversity of the girls and how well girls who are very different from each other get along so well, and also how truly warm these girls are toward each other.</p>
<p>I just graduated from Miss Porter’s and had a great experience. Now that I’m in college, I realize that going to an all girls school definitely gave me an advantage both academically, because I’m not afraid to speak up in the classroom and am used to the workload, but also socially because I know how to balance school and fun. </p>
<p>I found that there was much less drama at Porter’s than at my friend’s co-ed schools and that people were generally more down to earth. It didn’t matter what clothes you wore or where you were from- people didn’t care about that kind of stuff. I remember when I was going through a rough patch my friends rallied around me and offered to come back to school (they were day, I was a boarder) to be with me, even though it was right before midterms. </p>
<p>If you have any questions about MPS, please do hesitate to PM me!</p>
<p>travelreader makes a good point about the “drama” or lack thereof. In fact, my dd at Emma regularly comments on two things:</p>
<ol>
<li>“I can’t BELIEVE how much drama we DON’T have, without boys in the classroom,”
and</li>
<li>“Can you believe we almost didn’t look at Emma because it was all-girls?? I’m so glad we did!”</li>
</ol>
<p>I should also admit we are something more than advocates for Emma at this point. From the moment our dd first visited she felt she was “home” – and that feeling, both academically and socially, has only been reinforced since she arrived at school.</p>
<p>I am happy to answer specific questions via PM, though I admit limited experience.</p>
<p>OP, as your DD is a couple of years away from applying, I’ll chime in here. I’ve seen how kids sometimes change their mind quite a bit over time, especially in those jam-packed few months leading up to and immediately following acceptances. Our DC is now at Blair and very content. While it is a coed school, the girls seem very well-adjusted and not only get along well with each other, but seem to benefit from being pals with the guys as well. The school is a friendly and welcoming place where it is cool to do well academically, and the kids support one another. I haven’t seen ‘mean girls’, and the drama on campus, considering we are talking high school after all, is pretty low. About 90% of the faculty live on campus, and their doors are always open. They know and support the kids very well. Kids don’t fall through the cracks. The average number of kids in a class is 11. They are both strong academically and have a good presence in the arts. The warmth on campus is easily apparent. I even know a couple of Southern belles who have been very happy there! Good luck to you, and good for you for starting this process so early. What an education it is in itself!</p>
<p>You might also want to look at Dana Hall School. Fabulous arts and science programs as well as great sports teams (including a terrific equestrian team).</p>