<p>Hello all! My daughter is in her final year at a local private school, and we're starting to look at options for next year. One of our choices is boarding school.</p>
<p>DD is a wonderfully gifted dancer, and she's managed so far to balance dance and school, so she has good grades, and she seems to understand what she is learning.</p>
<p>My husband thinks she'd do well at boarding school, but I'm still very concerned that she's too young (she's ten-and-a-half). I have a friend who went to boarding school for high school, but she doesn't know much about junior boarding schools.</p>
<p>We compromised by saying that if she ended up going to boarding school, she'd stay in-state. The only junior boarding school we've found in the area is the Fox River Country Day School.</p>
<p>Any ideas or opinions on the school and/or junior boarding?</p>
<p>I don’t have any direct experience with junior boarding schools but I do have a movie to recommend to you. “Playing House”, a documentary by Jane Gray follows a year in the life of 5 girls enrolled for the first time in a junior boarding school (Fay). I saw the film a couple of years ago and I thought it was balanced and thought-provoking.</p>
<p>I also don’t have any personal experience with junior boarding schools. I did attend boarding school from 9th to 12th grades, however, and can give you some insights based on that experience.</p>
<p>Once I went away to school (at the age of 14), I never looked back. The major influences in my life from that point on were my friends and my teachers. I saw my parents during vacation, but that was it. Now that may not be typical - I’m sure there are plenty of teenagers who are closer to their parents than I was - but it is enough to make me think twice about sending a 10 or 11-year old away to school. When you send your child away, you are trusting the school to raise her from this point on and help her grow into a strong and productive adult. Chances are that once your daughter leaves for school, she won’t be coming back. She’ll stay at boarding school through 12th grade and then go off to college. I guess, if it were me, I’d want to hold onto her a while longer.</p>