<p>I don’t share your admiration of pulsar, but thank you for your straight forward answer on your relation to pulsar. Straight forward responses seem to elude pulsar.</p>
<p>I also come from a very modest background through very poor public schools. I didn’t have the advantage of a college educated parent. I’ve also had a great deal of success through hard work. This has helped me appreciate the exceptional education my son is receiving at BS. We won the lottery from my point of view. There are some similarities in our backgrounds, but I wouldn’t come on a public chat board to complain that my child didn’t get into X honors class or get to play Y sport so I’m not getting my $50k worth. You’ll excuse me for misreading your level of satisfaction with the BS experience based on your prior comments. Good luck to your son.</p>
<p>You wouldn’t go on a public chat…but I would.</p>
<p>Yes, I want to be able to complain…share my frustrations etc. If I just wanted to paint rosey pictures, I wouldn’t need a chat board.</p>
<p>In the end, he is doing well without the one honors class and I think he will have opportunities to take some subsequently, and he is playing his sport afterall. I may have jumped the gun a little bit, but that’s my personality.</p>
<p>just to clarify before I get baraged again with “huh???”</p>
<p>he is not taking honors Science, but honors most everything else including Math which is his thing.</p>
<p>I am hoping since high level Math and high level Science (at least physical science) goes together, he will have the opportunity subsequently of taking Honors Science.</p>
<p>And we still have not gotten a reply from his dean about how decision was made, why he didn’t get into H Science class this term.</p>
<p>Red-for families in my situation, those that can’t dish out 50K, bs is hitting the lottery. I really don’t expect all to understand the plight of the middle class. Like many parents, we want what is best for our kids, but no matter how much I wanted bs, w/o fa my kid would not be there.</p>
<p>My d is loving her experience so far and she is safe.</p>
<p>And no I haven’t taken a sip of the kool-aid, we drink tap water in my house.</p>
<p>@red Are there some great public schools and wonderful teachers? Of course! They aren’t the ones that do damage, silly. C’mon, do I really need to clarify that? Obviously, it’s the bad ones who do the damage. And they are there. If you think that every teacher in every public school is Mary Poppins, you are sadly naive. They often don’t realize the damage that they do, but that doesn’t make it any less damaging.</p>
<p>I’m middle class too, just worked all my weekends for the last 12 years to be able to afford BS. Yeh, you hit the lottery all right, if you’re not paying.</p>
<p>red—I think I must be confused, are you a parent or a student. And what bs are involved with. And what bs makes a middle class parent/student be full pay?</p>
<p>For some reason I dont think you are going to answer.</p>
<p>Alex, There is a thread about FA and FP that you can search. The consensus and current reality is that if you have hooks like poor, URM etc. you are fully covered. If you are super rich, you don’t care about paying a paltry 50 grand. However, if you are middle class (MC) with no hooks like URM you are socked with the full bill. If you are MC, you may not want to apply for FA if you really want to get in as there are so many MC applicants and the competition for MC applicants is fierce. So if you are MC, you are between a rock and a hard place as far as BS admissions go.</p>
<p>Oh I’ll answer all right A’s mom. I’m a parent, and no I don’t need to disclose which school. </p>
<p>I think Pulsar states it best, but are you that naiive to think that upper middle class parents don’t have to full pay?</p>
<p>I’ve worked weekends, to be able to afford BS, and opportunities for my kids. Maybe I should’ve been a slacker like others, not given up my weekends and accepted a lot of FA, but I didn’t want to leave anything to chance.</p>
<p>Parents and students needing FA are slackers. Hmm. You’ve succeeded in insulting an awful lot of parents on the board. And since a lot of schools are looking at sliding scale for middle class, if you’re a full pay you are either:</p>
<ol>
<li>not upper middle class - but in the top 1% of the country.</li>
</ol>
<p>or </p>
<ol>
<li>they didn’t really want your child (based on astute decision of your child’s first choice school, and the fact that other similarly situated familes are getting FA at many of the GLADCHEMMS) but wanted/needed the revenue from your tuition dollars which you are only to willing to part with (then whine about). Your child is a source of revenue in a bad economy, I suspect.</li>
</ol>
<p>Both are pretty likely from the bread crumbs you’re dropping like the fact that your child rejected at Andover - your stated “top choice.” $50K is well above the tuition for Exeter and SPS so it’s likely not one of those (although both were gravitating towards full pays this year). He was enrolled in only one honors class at “unnamed fictitious school” instead of all the ones he wanted implying he wasn’t academically ready, and you resent having to pay for the “kool-aid” with no proof of return on investment (your words).</p>
<p>BTW - since when is a child’s education measured in ROI?</p>
<p>You have one daughter looking for examples of a winning essay but she - at that time, also indicated she didn’t get into to ANY schools and was pleading for help with admissions making me think he/she is the same kid. You’ve worked weekends for 12 years to pay for boarding school when only one kid is in school now (ummm - how many kids are you trying to put through BS?)</p>
<p>This is all fascinating but it fails as a cohesive narrative.</p>
<p>Still, you’re insulting a lot of parents on this board who I’ve come to know and love offline. Parents whose kids are actually in honors classes, and sports teams (without parent pushing the issue) and their admittance (since they are of all races and cultures) has nothing to do with hooks. They were just better than yours. Case closed.</p>
<p>But good luck with that Ivy League dream you said was your ultimate goal in previous threads. I think they’ll see you and your progeny coming from a mile away and I don’t foretell a good outcome for your child if you act this way when he’s applying to college.</p>
<p>Those on both sides of the debate have migrated from attacking each other, bad enough, to denigrating the accomplishments of each others’ children, still worse. It is, at a minimum, poor form.</p>
<p>I came to this site to gain much needed information on the boarding school admission process. I have returned to the site with the hope of paying forward the favor to others embarking down the same path. This site, and some of the posters on this thread, were very helpful in sorting through uncharted territories. That transfer of information, from the experienced to unexperienced, was CC at its best. </p>
<p>This is CC at its worst. </p>
<p>My unsolicited advice would be to stop. But feel free to carry on as you deem appropriate.</p>
<p>This is exactly what I have been saying is the problem with your posts. Let’s do some reality check. Tell us how many parents you know offline? Post us the stats you got from your parent contacts to conclude that their admittance is nothing to do with hooks. Saying “they were just better than yours” without really meeting anyone is meanness beyond the pale. Now this is a great opportunity for everyone to see the substance or lack there of of your posts past and present full of made up stuff out of nowhere but your imagination gone wild.</p>
<p>Please, all of you, please stop. I don’t post frequently but read through threads often as I am very interested in making sure that possible applicants and their families are able to come to CC and find honest information and pleasant discourse. I love threads that discuss the challenges and negative of boarding school and I also love the threads that praise the experience or provide information on a specific school. This site can be a wonderful resource but currently it seems that every thread is being taken over by petty arguments between a few people. I don’t care who’s right/who’s wrong, please end it so that others may actually use the site fruitfully. I’m sure this post will elicit all sorts of angry responses and I’m OK with that, just please stop being so inconsiderate in your posts, it doesn’t help anyone.</p>
<p>Back to the original subject - the movie WAITING FOR SUPERMAN seems intriguing, but only if the point comes through that good public schools are few and far between in urban areas and that children should not be subjected to a lottery in order to get a good education.</p>
<p>I wonder what, if anything, would have been the outcome if the “lottery” that chose us - or our children - for boarding school and barred others had been different. </p>
<p>Somehow I don’t think the life of a child in public school should be a matter of fate and luck.</p>
<p>When the movie is out, perhaps we can have a discussion here on the merits of it.</p>
<p>First of all, please don’t say that I am another ID of pulsar or redblue… 'cause I am not. I’ve been a quiete lurker for a while and have been following a few “high profile” threads including this one, interested and sometimes amused. Now, I know pulsar and redblue… are different voices and not popular here, but this is going too far.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So, here Exie is implying that redblue’s child is in not good enough to be admitted to a top tier school like Andover, Exeter or SPS. What if (s)he is in Taft? Is that good enough? And then she went on saying the child “wasn’t academically ready”. Do you know the child? How can you say such a thing? It’s just mean!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The first sentence is really two sentences: 1. You insulted a lot of parents; 2. The parents you insulted are the parents I KNOW and LOVE. So, a shout to these parents: Tell me which side are you gonna choose? </p>
<p>“Hooks or not” could be a wrong perception from redblue, but “they were just better than yours”? How much nastier can this get???</p>
<p>
<br>
You don’t foretell a good outcome? Who are you??? And that’s the way you deal with people who have different opinions? Exeter graduate? MIT alum? :banging my head on the wall:</p>
<p>It is indeed better than the best reality show… sigh</p>
<p>The truth is that no one can understand how bad things are in some urban public schools unless they experience it. My daughter decided on boarding school herself because her public school was awful. My brother’s kids attend very nice public schools in another part of the country. I have taught in both kinds of schools. Please believe me when I say that you simply would not believe HOW BAD it can get. Even the very best, brightest kids from solid families can’t thrive in the bad environments, not to mention the kids with fewer resources and flimsy support networks.</p>
<p>I will certainly see “Waiting for Superman” some time in the near future. I look forward to discussing it or reading others’ discussion of it. From my exposure to small, unregulated private schools, I would suspect that charter schools are often mismanaged, too. How can we fix this mess of a system?</p>
