Ok, it’s been a while since I’ve been through this pocket of CC, but we recently found ourselves in Mercersburg for a couple days and I remember, a few years back, how eager Mercersburg Academy was to get quality, top-tier students into the school.
About 10 years ago, as most of you know, Mercersburg received a $100 million booster shot from the Simon family and it seemed like the school really zoomed into this mode of (for lack of a better term) “competing” with the NJ boarding schools and even the legendary New England schools. Mercersburg really let us know how much they wanted our kid to attend – academics, athletics, the whole nine - and the attention felt quite genuine. All those sentiments came back to us when we returned to town.
I’m saying this for a couple reasons. One, we had a spectacular weekend at The Mercersburg Inn – incredible fireside dinner (“nameplates!”), live music every other Friday, leisurely complimentary breakfast, bedside cookies, all for a reasonable price. *
*Maybe because it’s February and the nearby ski resorts are hardly active with record-high winter temperatures, but we were happy with the price.
In any case, the second thing is that the Mercersburg Academy campus is simply stunning. We’ve toured all the top-ranked schools in New England (Deerfield, St. Paul’s, Andover, Exeter, Ct-based Choate & Taft, etc.) Much like a college such as Williams in Western Mass, even though it takes a hike to get there, Mercersburg’s campus is as beautiful as the best in NJ or New England.
My overall point is that for parents of 7th graders just beginning their boarding school search, Mercersburg needs to be in the mix. Trust me when I say that the school is very, very willing to compete with the better-known boarding schools for a kid that they want to be part of their academic family. And make sure you swing by the Mercersburg Inn, if only to have a tasty, elegant dinner.