We are struggling with making a final decision. My children have a choice of a large school, a smaller school, and small school. We feel like the stress at the medium size school will be manageable, but don’t see as many opportunities. At the large school there are a ton of opportunities but the pace, competition, and stress could make the experience horrible.
We really are having a hard time figuring out what makes someone able to handle a larger school? What type of person does not do well?
If your son or daughter moved from a big school to a little school after the first or second year, what in hindsight would have been a clue that it was not a fit?
Having looked at a few different options across the board size-wise, while the biggest schools can certainly check more boxes in many areas … at a certain point your kid can only do so much. Unless there’s some specific, unique opportunity that the large school offers that is critical for your kid it seems unlikely that all those perceived “opportunities” would actually make a material difference in your kid’s BS experience. We looked at it more from the perspective of how the school size meshes with our kid’s personality. If you’re doing revisit days, I’d personally focus more on how well your kid could see themselves fitting in with the other students they met, as opposed to whether choice A vs B has 20 more clubs and 3 more AP classes.
I have one who attended a big boarding school. It was the right place for him - great opportunities and he always had the personality that he competed with himself, where he was - not as concerned about what others were doing. So he wasn’t stressed out about classes, getting work done, etc. though plenty of his friends were. And he did well, so it wasn’t that he was happy and not working. Kid 2 would not have done well there, and is at a small day school for HS.
@twinsmama17 even the largest BS are much smaller than many LPS. I think finding a balance of academic, social and athletic opportunities is much more important than size alone. With that, I can answer your question as we have had a child attend a large BS and “crash and burn” there. She ended up graduating from a small LPS- which was great academically, as she excelled- but horrible socially as she was an outsider and bullied.
What made the BS a bad fit was really how our daughter responded to her environment. A little bit of background: our daughter was grade skipped, always played up on super competitive soccer teams, academic superstar, regularly got her choice of singing parts in choir etc, popular, pretty and built her identity around this experience. She was also extremely self conscious and a perfectionist. Of course, she was our second to attend PEA and we didn’t take any of this into consideration. We lived across the country and she also has a chronic disease she had to manage on her own (t1 diabetic).
Within a few weeks of arriving at BS, she quickly realized so was no longer the smartest, prettiest, best singer or most talented athlete. She auditioned for singing groups and was not selected. She struggled with Harkness as she preferred to be give the formula and instructions and replicate it. She had never taken a foreign language and found it extremely difficult. She didn’t take care of her condition as she was to overwhelmed by the emotional stuff she was dealing with. She ended up coming home that fall as her medical condition became a liability for the school- of course she was failing almost all of her classes. She came home, went to a large (3000+) LPS. She did great academically and socially - also got her medical condition back on track.
She earned her way back into the school the following fall. We still hadn’t considered the emotional factors of why this school was a terrible fit for our daughter. We had mistakenly thought it was all due to her medical condition. She ended up surviving through February that year. Came home, homeschooled until she went to a new small LPS (we moved cross country). She is now a happy successful junior at a great college.
We learned so much from this experience. Our other 3 have all loved PEA. None of them have similar personalities to our daughter. They are not competitive all all, can laugh at their mistakes and don’t need to be perfect. Feel free to pm me with any more questions you might have as you decide.
Another thing to consider regarding personality and endless opportunities --does your child have the ability to not overextend when faced with many opportunities. I have one kid who knows what he likes – he only joined 1-2 ECs. But he’s heavily involved in the 2 he picked and combined with sports & studies, occasionally he gets overextended (case in point, exhausted FaceTime kiddo last night after revisit days, tests and crew practice this week).Because of this, instead of weekend night socials, he goes to bed early and catches up on classwork Sundays.
Buuznkid2 would try every single activity she could get her hands on and be in the thick of every social event. Sleep and studies would suffer. So, sometimes more isn’t always better…it’s just more.
This decision is very individual driven. Even two kids with the same DNA don’t necessarily fit at the same school. (As illustrated by @vegas1 )
@PhotographerMom wish I could post them—they were quite impressive. Of course, he still has a huge scar from the NEPSAC XC meet where he was tripped and trampled and still ended up with a personal best time…that hole in the flesh was awesome!
@buuzn03 makes an excellent point: Kids only have 24 hours in a day, so they don’t have endless capacity to take advantage of every single opportunity, even at a small school
@AppleNotFar@HkissParent They are VERY UNDECIDED because they didn’t feel comfortable with the students they met at ANY of the schools. At one school they were getting a good feeling… then during a revisit class a teacher left the room during the class and immediately all of the kids started making fun of the teacher. They also noticed something else at that school where the kids were disrespectful. At one revisit they grouped all of the incoming kids together, instead of the students letting them attend class, that group of kids played games.
The biggest school has opportunities (of strong interest to my kids) that the smaller ones don’t offer or the smaller ones don’t offer to the same degree.
@twinmama17 ugh…the disrespectful making fun of the teacher would have been huge thumbs down for me. If those kids dont think twice to do that to the teacher…they won’t think twice to do it to each other.
S did not have a great revisit, but he loved the school he picked. The host was not a great match, not the same interests and classes weren’t a good fit (history class spent the double period in the library doing research for a paper and Spanish was level 1 identifying foods in the cafeteria, while he had been taking Spanish for a number of years and also was a long block prior to lunch, so lots of down time - but they did go see a dorm room and met a few friends).
@twinmama17 One thing not mentioned above is the size of the cohort can affect if your kiddo finds like minded students. In a cohort of 80-100 ( the size to which my kiddo applied ) it’s pretty small so there are no guarantees. In larger schools, 300 or so your kid is almost guaranteed to have similar kids to your own. The larger schools for us were more about brand names so the positive of the larger size canceled out what we were looking for as a family-great academics and personal development. The competitive hype around name brand was less important. My kiddo also did not find a like minded “nerd” at revisits. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
Making fun of a teacher shows many things among them, disrespect, poor upbringing, and negative social collusion. I would not be sending my kiddo there. At the school we are leaning to, kids were all really nice and not arrogant.
Yikes! As everyone else has posted here there are lots of different ways to look at these schools as far as why “big” vs “small” is better … but I think the culture of disrespect for teachers would be hard to look past … It’s always possible it was isolated, but the fact that it happens on a revisit day (when I would imagine kids would be on their better behavior) would be a concern … Maybe reaching out to some current parents directly might help add some more color to your impression (either good or bad).
“they didn’t feel comfortable with the students they met at ANY of the schools”–that makes my heart ache for you and your kiddos. I’m guessing that staying home, and not going to BS, isn’t an option?
As for another “large” school perspective, my kid (an introvert) attends Andover. At just over 1,000 students, the size is comparable to the options we have at home so it never seemed “big” in our perspective. (The LPS I attended had 4,000–that’s truly “large”.) The important size consideration for us was class size, and at PA 12 is the higher average class size; my kid has/has had classes with less than 12 students. Faculty have a limited number of classes each term, and so my kid has never felt like “just a number” with regard to any of the teachers. And in terms of residential life, AppleKid has been in small dorms both years and loves that environment. I think that the school having that kind of housing option mitigates the large feel for kids who prefer a closer community. I really think that the only time AK has a sense of being part of a large student body is during the all school meetings. Otherwise, my kid is part of intimate communities within the classroom, in the dorm, and in each of the different activities the kid participates in.
School size was a gating factor for CaliKid. CaliKid attended a private middle school with approximately 60 kids per grade and really wanted a larger school with more activities and a larger student body. Even among students of relatively similar academic profiles, personalities differ a lot. CaliKid tends to get along well with most kids but historically has been selective when it comes to forming close friendships. CaliKid would self-identify as a bit quirky and having a class size large enough to meet other kids with varied interests was important.
