<p>I've visited most of these schools and will most likely apply to all of them. I'm primarily focused on "fit", so could anyone give some insight on the culture/community of each school? I'd be applying as a day student, but I know many schools are primarily boarding, so do the different populations integrate? What are the strengths/weaknesses of these schools? Any positives or negatives I should definitely know? Thanks!</p>
<p>I can give you some info on Concord. CA is about 50/50 day/boarding and the two groups mix very well. Both my kids were day students and more than half of their closest friends were boarders. About 70% of the day students eat at least one dinner a week at school. Day students often stay overnight with boarders and vice versa. Boarding houses are closed during the school day so all students are on campus (or in town). Because of the easy access to Rt 2 as well as the commuter rail, day students come from a broader geographic range than probably many other schools.</p>
<p>It’s a casual, friendly, welcoming environment. There are various groups of friends but no cliques. There are many male/female and cross-grade friendships. Students call teachers by their first names (except for Mr Pickle, for obvious reasons). The entire school meets together first thing in the morning every school day. Three or four times a week a senior will give a 15 minute talk during this meeting. All seniors have this opportunity and it’s an important part of the school culture.</p>
<p>CA has very rigorous academics combined with a non-competitive atmosphere. There are no honors, honors classes, class rank, or awards at graduation. Classes are held five days a week in a block schedule (each major class meets 3 times a week). There are a lot of electives for a school of its size.</p>
<p>On weekends, students study, hang out at school or in Concord, or head into Boston or Cambridge. Day students typically stay at or head to school for weekend activities, as opposed to students heading off to day students’ houses.</p>
<p>It’s the least sporty of the four schools you’ve mentioned; the other three schools are in a more serious sports league. CA doesn’t have football, ice hockey, or crew, but does have frisbee. Students are not required to be on a sports team. That said, many students are serious about sports (over 2/3 of the students are on a sports team each year) and they often have very good teams (in recent years, alpine skiing, cross country, and soccer have been very good). However, if you’re planning to go pro after graduation or get a Division 1 scholarship, it’s probably not the school for you.</p>
<p>It’s very strong in both visual arts and performing arts. I’d say almost all students have a strong interest in some aspect of the arts. There are about 7 or 8 theatre productions a year, and the energy in the audience is the equivalent of what you might find at a football game at another school. Productions involve musicians, dancers, and a variety of people involved in tech. For example, about 20% of the students were involved in some way in the recent production of Hairspray, and during some parts of the show over 10% of the student body was on the stage dancing and singing.</p>
<p>Thank you so much. I visited Concord and definitely liked it. I’m more of an artsy person so I think it could be a good fit.</p>
<p>@photodad
Could you explain in greater detail the reasoning behind the ‘No dorm during the day rule’ at Concord? I know what the party line was from out parent tour guide at the school, and I wasn’t buying into it - at all. I like, no- LOVE- everything about this school excepting this ridiculous rule. I know the stated theory is ‘fairness’ and keeping all students to the same experience during the day hours, but that is pure bunk. Day students experience is not the same as a boarders experience. It can’t be the same - and keeping a subset of students out of their one space on campus to call their own all day is insane. What if they need to grab an extra sweatshirt? I know from the experience of my older kids that they often needed a change of clothes in fall/spring due to mercurial weather. And their day friends were grateful to be able to borrow stuff or keep stuff in my kids dorms for easy access. It was/is a marvelously symbiotic relationship. What if it pours? Do the adults just say - oh well, sorry you’re wet, tough it out? It seems to me that students are supposed to sherpa all their junk around all day adding to the endless piles of clutter clogging up every single entrance to the campus buildings. I was climbing over backpacks, discarded jackets, a random tennis racquet, a soccer ball, and other assorted flotsam and jetsam that were totally plastered with wet leaves (from being on the damp and dirty floor) on the entire tour. Day students do eventually go home and have a household to return to at night; they have choices that boarders do not. I could go on - but I won’t. We have our two youngest kids in this app cycle that are very interested in CA - but this arbitrary rule bugs me to no end. Especially (!) when other schools do make an effort to bind the two groups in better ways - such as day student lounges in affiliated dorms. If my tone is grumpy I apologize - I don’t want to cross this place off the list, but I can’t see how this rule benefits anyone. I would like to hear from a current parent on how this “all my stuff, all the time” works in practice and maybe how the students felt about it.</p>
<p>The primary purpose is that all students be on campus during the school day to encourage social interaction. For example, if two students are spending a free period in a boarding room, they’re only going to see each other. If they’re instead spending it in the lounge, the library, or a bench outside, they’re going to be seeing a lot of other students.</p>
<p>From a practical point of view, a house parent is present in a house whenever students can be there, so the school would need to provide extra staff if the houses were open during the day. The houses are small, so this would require more staff than for a school with larger dorms. If a student has forgotten something in a room, they can contact a house parent and get it. If any student is feeling off during the day and wants to take a nap for an hour instead of going to class, they can do so in the medical center. Day students do keep things in boarding students’ rooms (for example, athletic clothes), they just don’t have access to these items during the school day. Anyway, if it did start pouring, a student would get wetter dashing to his or her room that he or she would moving between academic buildings. In my experience, high school students aren’t the most enthusiastic users of rain coats (or coats in general) in any case. You must have been at the school on a bad day; I’ve given tours there regularly for a few years and have never had a problem with the backpacks, etc. around campus. </p>
<p>In practice, the rule is no big deal. It’s part of the school culture and I haven’t heard anyone at the school complain about it. Frankly, if you love everything else about the school, this seems like a pretty minor issue. Does the rule bug your kids as much as it does you?</p>
<p>I guess it bugs me because in both schools that my 3 older kids attended/attend there wasn’t/isn’t this enforced vacating of the dorms during the day, and none of my kids or their array of friends seemed to feel like their social interactions were being stifled. It seems economically driven, rather that what’s best or easiest for the students. Given the fact that I have the perspective of 7 years of being a BS parent (and also on faculty at one), I just feel like other places have solved this issue and by making it a non-issue. Boarders have dorm rooms - because they are boarding students. Day students are welcome to use the lounges or dorm spaces. Very few kids hide away on a regular basis, and if they are spending time the in their room there is usually a good reason (unwell, changing clothes, needing a quiet space that isn’t a communal lounge area). Anyway, I guess it is a deal breaker, because it bothers my kids to no end - mostly because they think its weirdly different from the other three schools that we are most familiar with (ranging in size from 225-1000+ students) that don’t have this policy. I am hard put to think of any other school that I have ever considered or toured (other than Junior Boarding Schools) that closes dorm spaces during the day. They don’t like feeling of being unwelcome in their own home away from home, which to me isn’t a minor issue.
As an aside, the parent tour guide, said that there are always backpacks everywhere and it was a very typical thing to just kick then to the side or walk around them, as the lockers are inconveniently located and the kids never use them.</p>
<p>Eaglebrook had this policy on Saturdays and it WAS a big deal to my son. I was told that the reason was to keep the kids from holing up in their rooms, but I can attest that my son and his friends found it a noticeable inconvenience, it did keep them from retrieving things from their rooms, and it definitely did make them feel like they were locked out of their “home” during those times. In an otherwise excellent experience, this was a negative.</p>