<p>Yes, Deerfield is incredibly strict. This occurred in the dining hall during Parents Weekend 1838:</p>
<p>[Oliver</a> - please sir i want some more - YouTube](<a href=“- YouTube”>- YouTube)</p>
<p>(Sorry, the rivalry between Choate and Deerfield is legendary.)</p>
<p>To be more helpful, all of the schools have rules designed to keep the kids well occupied and safe. There is low to no tolerance for disruptive behavior. Given the ever increasing numbers of applications to these schools, though, I wouldn’t say the kids find them overly restrictive. Students have a lot of good, safe fun at BS. But, the schools do vary in formality and how many strikes are allowed for mistakes and what the repercussions are for those mistakes. You are doing the right thing – go to each school’s website to review its policies and then visit those schools with policies you are comfortable with.</p>
<p>Only Deerfield restricts students to one bowl of porridge.</p>
<p>If international diversity is a primary concern, you might want to explore the United World Colleges. US students who are chosen go for free - not sure how it works for Canadians.</p>
<p>The strictness issue is discussed in some length, if I’m remembering correctly, in the downsides thread. I’ll briefly reiterate what I said there–one of the hardest things for my kid about boarding school has been having friends get kicked out for offenses that wouldn’t have rippled the surface of a public school. I agree with those decisions, and I consider Exeter neither overly strict nor overly lax in their discipline, but it’s definitely stricter than day school, and at times can feel harsh. You couldn’t pay me enough to take that job–keeping all that combined adolescent energy working productively and positively 24/7. </p>
<p>Another issue to consider is where your son will fit athletically at the school. Some good athletes go to boarding school and find themselves stuck on jv because the recruited athletes and pg’s make up most of the varsity. This hasn’t been the case for my kid, but it’s something worth looking into if your son loves to play.</p>
<p>On the issue if strictness, some schools have a one-strike-you’re-out policy. Two schools that were mentioned on the thread titled “List of Exceptional & Unique Offerings st some BS”, which have this policy are Hotchkiss & Pomfret</p>
<p>For those parents who have children at one-strike policy schools how do you find it? Do you get the sense that there are a lot of kids being told to go home for reasons that you wouldn’t even discipline your kids for? Or do you find it refreshing that there is such a focus on behaviour and things like alcohol issues, smoking and a lot of “parenting” type concerns are being handled separately from you so you don’t have to be the bad guy.</p>
<p>When making your choices did you often find that you and your kids were on the same page about where they wanted to be? I want my son to make the final decision about where he wants to be, whether that means stay where he is, or head off somewhere else, but at the same time, if I’m bearing the entire cost I think it’s reasonable that he only apply to places that I’m comfortable with. Do people have a view on this? I think it’s reasonable, and if that is the way we go about it, I feel like we should really only be visiting places at the outset that I’m ok sending my kid to, and then only applying to those places that we’ve visited that I’ve had a better sense of and still feel comfortable with. The idea being that anywhere he applies he should go to because I’ve already had my say.</p>
<p>To be clear, the one-strike rule (at least at Hotchkiss) applies only to drugs and alcohol, not to all rules violations. There is a student disciplinary committee that decides on punishments for other rule violations. That’s not to say that a student couldn’t be asked to leave for reasons other than drugs/alcohol, but that’s the biggie. Some of the Hotchkiss parents I have spoken to feel that the one strike policy really helps the kids by giving them some extra ammunition to resist peer pressure. Also, there is an exception to the one-strike rule – if a student is drunk or using drugs and the student or a friend feels that they need medical treatment, they can invoke the “infirmary” exception and the student will be treated medically, with no risk of the one-strike rule being applied.
As for your other question about how much of the decision is you vs. your kid, we didn’t even look at schools that I wouldn’t have been ok sending him too. For us, the way we did it was that we talked through in advance some of the attributes that were important to him (coed or all boys, how far from home, size of the school, etc). Then, armed with that, I did the research and came up with a list of schools that both fit those attributes and were schools that I thought made sense for him (and us). He was fine with that list, and then we went from there.</p>