How far is too far?

Prep School Admissions Prep School Parents
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<p>Boarding school is basically a foreign concept in my area so this whole time I've been researching, away just felt like "away" from home. It's all far. But now I'm wondering things like, an 8 hour drive versus a 16 hour drive? My son went to camp for 3 weeks this past summer and it was about 4 hours away by car. He loved it, didn't have any problems. We originally signed up for 2 weeks but he called begging for a 3rd week just a few days in. </p>

<p>Experienced parents, do those hours of distance feel farther over time or does it get easier? Will I regret choosing that school 16 hours away instead of 8 hours away? We're in the midwest so almost everything is far.</p>

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<p>We are 16 hours away. We would miss her even if she was 4 hours away! LOL</p>

<p>But, seriously, the only thing we really feel the distance on is our inability to go to her games all the time. It is hard to feel connected to the school and the community, but that would be the case even if we lived much closer. For us, the first 6 weeks or so up until Parent’s Weekend were very difficult. Once we went to school, saw her in her new environment and met parents/kids/teachers/staff, we felt much better. So I would say it gets better over time. But we are only in our first year. Others may have better input!</p>

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<p>I think once you get OVER 8 hours (i.e., a day trip in a car) distance becomes moot.</p>

<p>That said, we happen to like the ability to get “there and back” in a day, so have pretty much gravitated to schools within 3 hours of home for 7D2…whereas we had included schools in the 7+ hour driving range for her older sister.</p>

<p>Here is my shameless plug (for a school we have no official affiliation with) for Thacher in CA. IMO, if you are considering schools that are a 16 hour drive away, you are basically in “maybe we fly” territory.</p>

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<p>yeah, I haven’t eliminated any options due to distance because we’re located in Central Illinois so it’s pretty much either go east or west. There’s of course Interlochen in Michigan but my son is more science and math than art. It’s not the school for him. We’ve looked at one in St. Louis but it’s Catholic, though you don’t have to be, we aren’t so I’m not sure I’d want to toss him into going to Mass weekly and all of that. I have info from Thatcher already and it looks amazing. </p>

<p>Regardless of the distance, I know I’m going to panic and cry and all of that but I’m so hard not to project my own fears on my child. They’re mine, not his.</p>

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<p>I’m within reasonable driving distance to both schools, but that wasn’t by design. I think I could have handled it if they chose schools further away.</p>

<p>Either way, the true unsung heroes for all boarders are Day Student families and the school staff living on campus. There’s plenty of wonderful family-style support for kids who live far away.</p>

<p>I have many Day Student mom friends who are like second mothers to my kids- They host them for weekends or sign them out for a week night dinner. The nice thing for me (living within a reasonable distance) is to be able to host them at my house for the weekend, too. I’ve also hosted international students for holidays and breaks and that’s been a lot of fun.</p>

<p>You might ask: How do I get to know Day Student parents if I live so far away? You get to know them because the kids bring everyone together and plan everything!</p>

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<p>Have you considered Cranbrook in Bloomfield Hills, MI? Cranbrook is part of the Cranbrook Educational Community (CEC) which includes the Cranbrook Institute of Science. It’s an excellent school within driving distance from you.</p>

<p>I always make a plug for [post=13631665]Northfield Mount Hermon[/post] which has a very different vibe from many of the most-discussed schools here and is equipped to help kids who learn differently. If you haven’t checked out NMH, I highly recommend you do so. It has a gorgeous campus (over 1,000 acres), a working farm, great food (they make their own ice cream and tap their own maple trees), each kid participates in the operation of the school/farm with a work-job, and the academics are excellent.</p>

<p>On another note, our kiddo has a long trek to and from school by air as no airline flies direct from our major airport to Hartford. It’s the biggest downside to BS for us, but he takes it in stride. I do wish we lived closer to attend events but that seems a small price to pay for the education and experience he is getting.</p>

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<p>One of the great Thacher families lives in Illinois. This admission’s video of their last boy to attend describes a bit of the experience. <a href=“https://www.thacher.org/podium/default.aspx?t=52562&a=137668&play=1[/url]”>https://www.thacher.org/podium/default.aspx?t=52562&a=137668&play=1&lt;/a&gt;. Like your son, Morgan was heavily into math & science and is at MIT now. We found, being 3000 miles away from the School, that you get into a really nice rhythm. Our son was home for all the major holidays and we were in Ojai once in the Fall and once in the Spring, plus a father/son long weekend in February. </p>

<p>We kept in touch with our son via text, email and phone calls. The School does a GREAT job of making you feel included through notes that advisers, teachers, coaches and admins send. You also form nice friendships with the parents of your kid’s friends and so there’s a lot of comforting back channel communication.</p>

<p>Thacher is quite generous with their financial aid as well. If you decide to explore the School in earnest, please let me and the other Thacher parents on this site know like mountainhiker, mussels, patronyork etc. All of us are here to help in any way we can. Best of luck to you!</p>

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<p>Wow-Morgan sounds like a great guy.
We live in Maine and so pretty much no matter how you look at it, BS is far away for us. The way we are getting through the thought of our daughter living at such a distance (we are looking at Thacher as well as schools that are an 8 hour drive) is to suspend judgement about the distance piece until she looks at all the schools and we have the “good fit” talk. Of course there is nothing like a rejection to help the decision making process. For us, if we crossed off all the schools that were more than a four hour drive from here, then we would not be left with many options. Sometimes it’s hard to stay the course with friends and family weighing in about distance. It certainly would be easier if our daughter wasn’t so enamored with Thacher…</p>

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<p>@ThacherParent: Thank you!! I’m checking this video out now! Great to know that I’ll have some parent support. We are going to have to truly nail down a few extra schools in the next week. We’re already late to the game. Taking SSATs on December 7th. I’m not too worried because he took the Middle lever last year for a local school that we ended not applying too. He went in completely cold, no prep and scored between 75-80% on each. Not the level of many on here, but well above the average of the two schools we’ve been considering. We’ve also been studying vocab words, doing practice exams, a couple sections a week since late August and he’s scoring mostly in the 80s for his percentile based on the chart in the SSAT prep. We also got some accommodations set up just in case. Key board for writing portion of the exam, marking answers in the booklet, and extra, though I never give him extra at home for practicing. I don’t want him to use and he probably won’t because it’s only going to wear him down more for the last sections. Meds will be worn off and all of that. </p>

<p>I’ve never even been to California. Can’t imagine sending my kid that far, but he would be all for it, I’m sure. He loves getting the chance to travel and see new things.</p>

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<p>@ChoatieMom: I had to look up Cranbrook again to remind myself why I hadn’t put it on the list. Now I remember. Only 34% of students board and I wanted him to have the full experience, with his peers doing the same. But this school also has K-8th grade, who can’t board, so perhaps that’s throwing off the percentage? Would be nice if they had a high school boarder percentage.</p>

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<p>Our son’s grandfather, who thought it was “insane to send [our] kid to California when New England is replete with the finest boarding schools in the world” visited my son during a business trip his senior year. The exact quote from the email he sent me afterward was “I was wrong about Thacher. It was incredible. I take back everything I said. You made the right decision. It’s worth it.”</p>

<p>Travel takes a day, planning, and some bucks (not too many if you plan in advance). If your child is admitted it will be a seminal experience in her life. Aside from a radically good education, it’s what happens outside the classroom that is magical. The mountains, the horses, the camping, the community, the weather…it will make for a happy Mainer.</p>

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<p>

Just the fact that boarding schools sport students hailing from 30+ states and 30+ countries demonstrates that plenty of families successfully cope w long distance boarding. The schools are very experienced w managing the logistics at break time to get students to airports & train stations. That said, I won’t lie to you. Long distance commuting does add considerable strain in terms of travel time, expense, time zone inconvenience & headache.</p>

<p>The travel occasions for boarding:

  1. 3 breaks when it is mandatory for students to vacate the dorms: Thanksgiving, Xmas, & Spring Break.<br>
  2. 2 parent weekends: Fall & Spring. The parent weekends are occasions to sit in on classes and engage in face-to-face parent-teacher conferences. This will involve hotel stays when the hotels are at peak occupancy.
  3. drop off at start of school year and pick up at the end. This could be a major logistical event if the boarder is a girl (the volume of clothes & furniture girls can shoe-horn into a dorm room defies Newtonian laws of physics).</p>

<p>If you are applying for FA, the school will consider transportation costs as part of the expense of enrolling. </p>

<p>We are an ultra-long distance boarding family-- we’ve learned that no matter which way we fly (over the Atlantic or over the Pacific), it’s a wash at nearly 30 hours one way, so we pretty much define the physical limit of how far is too far. But now S2 is applying to BS, and we’re OK w him choosing a different boarding school than his presently enrolled older brother. That will add a whole new dimension to our family’s logistics at Parent Weekends. </p>

<p>I’ve resigned myself to using most of my annual vacation leave to travel to see my kids at school. Bring it on…</p>

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<p>There are only three distances, those that can be driven roundtrip without an overnight stay, those that can’t, and those requiring a flight. The last two are nearly equal in expense when considering the cost of fuel and lodging but the flight takes a lot less time.</p>

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<p>Even though a school 8 hours away is not within comfortable driving distance, I’d choose it over a school 16 hours away if possible because the former gives you the flexibility of jumping in the car and driving over in case there’s some sort of emergency, not to mention the airfare can get very expensive in holiday seasons, and the kid can occasionally change their schedule close to the break so an early booking does not always help. Also, consider if there’s a major airport close to the school, and how far it is. The shuttle service to and from the airport can be costly, and if you count in the commuting time and checking in time at the airport, a 2 hour flight can easily take 4 or 5 hours even when there’s an airport reasonbly close by.</p>

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<p>Although we looked at a bunch of “local” schools that ranged in distance from 15 minutes to 5 hours from home, DS ended up choosing Thacher, the 3,000 mile away option. </p>

<p>Since we live in an area replete with private school options, people naturally assume we’re mad or that Thacher is a “special” school :-)</p>

<p>We’re only 8 or so weeks in, so early days of course, but I will say that the physical distance is less daunting than we thought. It helps that we have major airports at both ends. Another reality for us is that we have two younger children at home, each with full days/weekends. It would be tricky for us to take, say, a Saturday and wheel off to a school 3+ hours away. So, in some ways, being 3+ or a transcontinental flight away ends up being much of a muchness. Had we not the younger sprogs to chauffeur, of course, things might be different. I think part of the appeal for DS, too, in making the decision to go west was that experiential dimension, to be in an immersive setting so different from that of his home environment. </p>

<p>The greater distance challenge for us has been the mental one, an adjustment that we all must make. It reminds me of childbirth in my own case. I was massively, totally, completely over-prepared for the birthing process itself, but spent zero time preparing for life with youngster. Having had a close relationship with our DS’s middle and elementary school, the families, teachers, activities, etc. there, the relative lack of transparency with high school life has been harder. All the usual hand-wringing stuff… I don’t have a view into the menu of choices my DS could make during his free time etc… is he “optimizing” his time, is he integrating fast enough, all the nervous hand-wringing parental stuff :slight_smile: However, another mom, whose son goes to a great private day school near us recently “complained” to me of the same issue. Her son told her, calmly and maturely, to stop worrying. She said to him, “I’m not worrying, I just don’t have a clear sense who your friends are or how your classes are going…” then she laughed. Of course, I realized I WAS worrying. </p>

<p>So that kind of distance has required the greater growth on our part, the parental rite of passage.</p>

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<p>Mussels, Thank you for your post. I would love to hear more about the transition and dealing with the distance as the fall unwinds and your DS settles in. As we contemplate such a distance, it’s nice to hear of a similar family who is in the middle of it. We have three younger children and I work in their school’s administration. Although I love what I do and how close I am to them all, it happened pretty much by accident that I am at their school. I think (its all relative i suppose) I am a pretty hands off parent when it comes to their work and how each individual child is learning- the faculty here is INCREDIBLE and inspiring so at this point my job is to stay out of their way (if that makes any sense). </p>

<p>My DD sounds like your DS- she is so enamored by the landscape, the distance, the adventure. Did you find that BEFORE you interviewed, he had a realistic sense of what he would see. Did it change much when he visited? Did the visit alone give him a real sense of what it would mean to be that far away? I am so curious.</p>

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<p>Hi freshlook,
My DS felt that his middle school experience was the equivalent of having died and gone to heaven. It was academically rigorous, attracted kids that loved learning for its own sake, achieved tremendous results (national champion mathematicians, etc.) but wasn’t aggressive or competitive, had a positive peer culture, a place where you could take social risks, like reading your own poem on stage or trying lacrosse for the first time, without fearing the social consequences of bombing. That colored his BS search. What high school, he figured, would be able to mirror all that? It was high school after all. </p>

<p>As I alluded, we live in an area where pretty much everywhere you turn, you trip over a great private school option. The choice can be overwhelming. </p>

<p>To avoid that, we asked him to focus on the top 3 or so criteria that would create the “high school of his dreams.” His answers were: an intellectually stimulating environment that attracted kids who were into that; a warm, authentic community, a place that was sincere, and kind; and a place where kids could bust out in all the best ways and where even he, a self-defined “nerd” could expand that moniker to become a half dozen other things as well.</p>

<p>Beyond that he didn’t much care if the school was day or boarding, near or far. He figured that it would be sufficiently rare to find these qualities individually much less altogether, that in light of that other considerations such as distance from home didn’t really matter. He’d go to where “there” was.</p>

<p>Anyway, not to make this a 1,000 word post, but those criteria were enormously helpful in guiding our search. We looked at 10 schools in all, both HADES and gem and day schools. But Thacher was his first choice from the beginning and remained so throughout, despite our touring some pretty phenomenal schools.</p>

<p>By reading Thacher materials cover-to-cover, poring through the website, reviews, finding CC and the Hidden Gems thread, (amen to ThacherParent and Mountainhiker!), talking to experienced folks in our own community, meeting the admissions rep, and essentially doing as much due diligence as we could find/think of, DS had a pretty solid sense of the school before we visited. </p>

<p>And we only agreed to visit after he had toured every other school, met with an admissions rep in our area two times, and matched up his criteria against it. Our budget is tight, so we couldn’t justify a “field trip” per se. He understood that. </p>

<p>His worry on the flight out for his tour and interview was that the reality wouldn’t match his expectations, since that’s most often what happens, right? So, he was enormously relieved to find the visit knocked it out of the park. He wanted it to work, but didn’t want to force it or delude himself if it just wasn’t going to be the place. Gotta love that about our kid. He’s real. But Thacher ticked his boxes and then some. Although not a sporty kid per se, he is an outdoorsman, loves hiking and kayaking… loves science, esp the life sciences so the integration of the natural environment into school’s philosophy and programming really spoke to him.</p>

<p>When we arrived at our hotel the night before the tour, it was about 3am East Coast time and my eyeballs were rolling to the back of my head. During our flight, our drive up, etc I kept reminding him. This is what it would be like. It takes this long to get there. It’s dark. Home is a transcontinental flight away. We’re heading to bed when you’re eating dinner more or less. This is a BIG commitment. What do you think? Can you really imagine that? But each time, he said, he really could. It would be okay. And that has proven to the be the case so far. Hasn’t really felt homesick. He actually felt bad admitting that in case our feelings would be hurt :-)</p>

<p>But, he’s an independent kid, and has frequently jumped into other immersive experiences, and has a yen for that kind of adventure.</p>

<p>At Family Weekend last week (which was amazing BTW), I grilled him. “Okay, so what are the top three highlights so far?” Straight away he said, “The community. It really is as they say. The kids, not just the freshmen but all the grades, the teachers, they’re all genuinely nice and welcoming; the faculty is amazing; and Ojai itself - it’s just beautiful waking up everyday with this around you, he said, sweeping his arm over to where the mountains flanked the landscape.” “What are the lowlights,” I then asked? “It’s hot.” (This is a kiddo who barely wears a jacket in winter.)</p>

<p>So, very long answer short, he had a pretty good sense of what he was getting into before he set foot on campus, although only two months in, he feels the experience really has lived up to its billing. Distance, though vast geographically, pales for him compared to finding a good, right spot. </p>

<p>Far away the greater adjustment, not surprisingly I suppose, has been for my husband and myself… with elementary and middle school you just know so much more, even if you’re not mother henning. It’s the nature of it. And it’s the nature of high school for there to be less transparency. Kids are more independent and expected to do their own advocacy, a fact true of both day and BS options.</p>

<p>We’re not pollyannaish though. It’s early days yet. My guy is one of those kids that takes it slow, transitions gradually. He likes the school, is very happy there, feels it is and will be the right school for him. But he says it’s just too early to say he loves it. You know? Will need to get a few more laps under him, get his friend group gelled, all that kind of thing first. Again, keeping it real for us. </p>

<p>I have probably over-answered your question… and am sorry for the length. But, feel free to PM me with any more. Happy to help.</p>

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<p>What a lovely description of your decision making experience and the school!! He sounds a lot like my son–not exactly an athlete in the traditional sense but loves outdoor recreation and science. Thacher sounds amazing! I’m not sure my kid will have the grades or SSATs for Thacher…</p>

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<p>Berkshire School might be an option: [Berkshire</a> School: Mission and Fast Facts](<a href=“Page Not Found”>Page Not Found)</p>

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<p>Wow! Thanks so much Mussels, I really appreciate your story and how well it all unfolded for your family. Your son sounds great. And I’m glad he is doing well. It’s so interesting to see how kids can gravitate towards one school over another. Just the process of looking at several schools and managing expectations is a journey in and of itself. It can’t be easy for these kids- it takes a steady hand to go through this process and come out knowing who you are enough to know what you want. Thanks again and I’ll look out for your posts as the year unfolds.</p>