@heartburner Thanks, but whatever the marketing department prepares, I usually find to be misleading and useless.
Traveling “across the country” to attend college is definitely not a new concept.
@justonedad
“The kid is only with you for 18 years and then, they’re gone. Why would you send them away 2, 3, 4 years early during a formative time in their life?”
The kids aren’t with me, I’m with them, whether they are here - or there.
There are many BS Parent/alums that post here and I am one. I’m a 3G BS alum/parent and my husband is a 2G so BS isn’t foreign to us. We sent our kids to JBS (7th grade) because I went to JBS and I wanted our kids to go and prepare for SS like I did. My parents sent me ( and my siblings ) to BS because they traveled a great deal for my father’s work and didn’t want to come home one day and find their house reduced to rubble and an elderly babysitter tied to a tree. Well, that wasn’t the only reason… dad went to BS ( like his dad ) and he wanted us to go because he loved it and benefited greatly from the experience- which has always amazed me because BS back then was extremely cold and draconian and he’s a very warm, lovely man.
My Grandfather was plucked out of extreme poverty by a wealthy relative and sent to BS after his parents died. He hated every second but worked hard and went on to become a very successful businessman after college. He sent my dad ( and his brothers ) to BS for… let’s say… inhumane reasons… but all of them ( who are still alive to tell the tale ) loved every minute and sent their kids. Go figure. Talk about a sinister plan blowing up in your face.
So- my generation went ( siblings and cousins) . By this time tradition certainly played a part but I would say the main reason we went was because of the deep and abiding gratitude ( our dad and his brothers felt ) for what BS taught them… and I would say 90% of the gratitude was for what they learned about themselves during that time. My generation (sadly) was a little slow to appreciate our experiences ( with poetry and verve ) and all we were given and didn’t fully realize what a gift it was until later on in life… just in time to send our kids! And, we’re walking!
This generation ( current students and young alums) are already talking about where they’ll send their unborn children- and they’re a lot smarter than we were and much more driven. They also seem more aware of the “opportunity” and the unholy sacrifice that goes into this ridiculously expensive adventure … and I believe they’re truly grateful… Talk about skipping a generation…
So, Why do you send your kid to BS? Well, I guess I could’ve sent my kids into the desert with a cliff bar and a bottle of water for a week and saved a bunch of money… but I chose BS because of the challenges ( I knew ) they’d face outside the classroom. The academic piece ( most parents are so focused on ) never crossed my mind really because I knew it was there and in my mind was secondary to what I knew they’d be learning about themselves… on their own and with their own compass to guide them.
I understand it’s difficult for people to understand unless they’ve gone to BS themselves. It wasn’t until I was on CC for a while that I began to wonder whether or not I’d send a kid to BS if I hadn’t gone myself . But maybe that’s why I’m here… to reassure parents and students or completely alarm them!
Either way… I can say with all my heart- that is was ( without question ) the best thing I’ve ever done for my kids- and it was definitely the best thing my parents did for me. Everything I learned while I was at BS is with me every single day…and what I learned during that time ( away from home and my loving parents ) has served me very, very well.
I give the 2G ( in our family) a lot of credit for setting the example for this Generation and occasionally reminding them why they’re there. Like my dad always tells my kids and their cousins ( before they head off to a new school/college ) :
Your parents must really believe in you ! 
But, PhotographerMom, did your grandfather’s wealthy relative consider CTY courses instead?
@PhotographerMom , Yes, you do both reassure and alarm.
I’m new to this site and a new BS parent. My oldest child will be attending BS this Fall. We never considered BS an option until we were encouraged to look at a local BS due to her academic and athletic abilities. At her first open house she stated, “this school is so me.” After 2 years of visiting the school and researching (we started when our child was in 6th grade,) we decided to let her apply as a day student. At the last minute, she begged us to apply as a boarder instead of a day student. It was completely her choice and she even came up with a list of pro’s and con’s for boarding as well as reasons why we should let her. She feels that this BS is a good fit for her and is excited to be moving in the Fall.
I have learned, as previous BS parents have stated, that this decision was not about me, but what was best for my daughter. It would’ve be selfish of us to keep this experience from her. She is mature, a natural leader, loves new experiences, is very responsible, and is more self-sufficient and confident than most of her 14 year-old peers. My hesitation at not allowing her to board was because of my desire to keep her at home, even if that meant she was only home to sleep. When we began to really consider what was best for her, we realized we couldn’t keep this experience from her.
After only making this decision a few short months ago, I cannot tell you how many criticisms and judgmental comments have come our way. But I’m confident in our choice for our daughter and I use the judgement from others as a reminder to not to be judgmental towards others. What’s good for one person is not necessarily good for another.
I’m trying to put myself back into an earlier frame of mind. At the time, we had reached the point at which we had decided our options were: 1) move to another public school district, 2) send our kids to a local day school or parochial school, (and we’re agnostic never-Catholics), or 3) boarding school.
In hindsight, had I to do it again, I would have found a solution to our problem, up to and including moving, two years earlier. Some things your kids only tell you when they’re adults.
I think we expected to find the same community feeling we had experienced in our own public schools, back in the day. By the time our kids were enrolled in school, though, that community experience (in my opinion) had been eroded by all the fees and parental involvement. It seems it’s no longer possible at our local public school to pick up a sport after the age of 10, and have any hope of playing on the team. Kids start playing instruments in elementary school, and face pressure from everyone to continue playing those instruments, even if another hobby might be more interesting. Voice lessons for middle schoolers. Yoga for kindergartners.
In all of it, parents are deeply involved, planning, driving, paying, setting their kids’ priorities. Tutors, pros, coaches, therapists, etc.
I’m too laid back for that. I’m a failure as a helicopter parent, and any attempt on my part to run their lives met with vigorous child opposition. They’re happy, busy, involved, active, curious kids/adults, who often volunteer for activities at school or college. But it’s their choice to sign up for something, not mine.
I found that the structure of activity fees at our local public school, as well as the expectation that parents would be deeply involved in activities, excluded some children from things we had done free of charge. (Keep in mind the real estate prices mean the town itself is not diverse.). Sports teams. Music activities. etc. Many families had to choose. Will it be baseball or band? Can’t afford both. So the choice of extracurriculars meant choosing a circle of friends. I’ve learned my kids like socioeconomic diversity, and yet at our local public school, some kids they really liked couldn’t afford extracurricular activities.
In contrast, at boarding school, the kids have to play sports, even if they’ve never had the opportunity. Even the kids who are really good at one sport, have to play other sports in the other two seasons. It’s possible to try out new things, even if you have to drop your oboe lessons to try out for the play, or join the robotics team. The boarding parents are out of town, and even the day parents can’t isolate their kids from the rest, as a boarding school has things happening from early in the morning to night. There are students on financial aid, and there are funds available to make it possible for them to participate in the life of the school.
I agree that unless kids are really good it’s not possible to continue sports beyond 4th grade. There are no recreational sports after that point. I also hear parents of kids doing both an instrument and a sport overcoming scheduling conflicts, complain about their kids being discouraged, teased and forced to choose one of the activities.
@periwinkle, that’s such a good point and one of my favorite things about my son’s boarding school experience. He’s playing two sports at BS that he’d never played before in his life – one that he’d never even contemplated trying before BS, and one that he’d always wanted to try but we didn’t start him early enough in it and he would have been too far behind in the local rec scene. And my daughter, who will be starting at BS next year, is already really excited about a new sport that she wants to try because on her revisit day, she learned that this team is very welcoming to kids who have no prior experience. At BS, it’s just the norm that the captain of the football team tries out for a part in the musical even though he’s never acted before, or the incredibly talented violinist is also the star of the cross country team, and no one thinks twice about it.
OTOH, for some kids, going to BS helps them get the most out of sport they already excel in…I’m thinking of sports like hockey, squash, fencing, and crew (because how many public schools have these facilities on campus?). “Sending” a kid to BS to play one of these sports may be better for their athletic development than staying at home.
Crew is a sport few if any kids have had any exposure to before high school. When asked about crew, both my kids stated, “it’s a cult.” Hockey also falls into this category. Before anyone gets offended, what they mean by that is that some sports (probably depending on the school) have teams of students who are fanatic adherents to that sport, far beyond anything which could be explained by reason alone.
I am very impressed by the kids who develop a passion for crew during high school. It’s a beautiful sport. It’s also a true team sport. The boat has to work together. There’s no room for individual glory. If you stroke faster than your teammates, it doesn’t end well.
Someone whose children became crew gods can correct me, but I’m not sure crew in itself is a hook for college. There are physical traits coaches look for, I gather…something about erg scores? So sure, if you’re big, strong, and have great erg scores, having experience in a great crew program can be a plus. On the other hand, if you’ve never set foot in a crew boat, if you’re big and strong it might be worthwhile finding out if you might be a good candidate for crew.
On the third hand, I think I’ve heard that being a great coxswain can be a plus. So, very small, loud voice, good sense of direction, able to get the attention of intense athletes.
It is hard, though, to predict how large an 8th grader will become in four years. Many high school athletes are sidelined by injuries at some point in high school. Even if your child is a standout athlete in middle school, it’s good to choose a school which would fit her even if she receives a career-ending injury in junior year.
As does lax, IMO.
Son played rec soccer and loved it, and the sport generally; it’s how he learned geography, at age 7-10, through reading about things like the shenanigans of the Serb fans, making WC brackets, etc. Actually, he made brackets and fantasy leagues for a handful of sports, so American cities and more became part of his geography. He never joined a travel or club team, but was a good middle school player against other schools. (Almost ditto for basketball, which he came to later in life.) He ended up playing two years of JV soccer at BS before giving football a try his junior year and getting a starting position in the backfield, due to another’s injury. He also started playing two sports new to him, squash and crew. He stopped getting taller in high school, which has been detrimental to his advancement in crew. BS sports have given him the full range of experiences, from the ecstatic to the self-doubting, from failure to redemption. He will not be recruited for any sport, and I foresee him playing clubs and/or intramurals at college as the spirit moves him. His opportunities and experiences have been totally founded upon the small size of his BS, they have been “lessons for life”, and they have been about the present moment, without any strategic calculation.
What’s more, he’s been able to participate every single school term not just in these sports, but also as a member of the school orchestra and the jazz band, and as a mentor to a local kid at a middle school.
I point this out to lend further perspective to the comments above about the state of athletics at high schools. My son has lots of classmates with similar EC profiles in athletics and the arts (and service off or on-campus). Maybe schools where specialization reigns are the majority, but, thankfully, there are some schools still for generalists, or well-rounded students. These kids do not face an either/or proposition between the arts and athletics.
Our son joined the crew cult at BS even though he had never even thrown a ball prior; chess was his idea of a sport in middle school. The initial appeal of crew was that, as @Periwinkle stated, almost all kids start as novices in high school, so he wasn’t afraid of his inexperience. But crew is funny, you love it or you hate it. It requires too much pain and endurance (how about having to break up ice at the water’s edge with your bare feet [because your shoes are bolted to the boat’s footboard] before lowering the boat into freezing water at O-dark-thirty?) to ever be a casual sport, thus the “cult.” Crew is never-ending. There is no off season, and the top rowers do not participate in other sports during the school year; there is regatta crew in the fall, erg practice all winter, racing in the spring, and more erging and fitness work in the summer. Some BS rowers are also club rowers and work with their clubs right along and through the summer. More than anything else, crew has defined our son’s life and time at BS. Though he started as a novice and non-athlete, he ended up near the top of the varsity roster by senior year, and the bonds with teammates are like marriage. He will row in college but not as a recruit.
Crew is certainly a hook for some colleges and top rowers are heavily recruited. Elite rowers are (very) tall, long-armed, muscular, and have low body fat levels, but they don’t all start that way. Again, as @Periwinkle noted, you can’t predict the full expression of your child’s genetic characteristics, but the sport itself will push every fiber of their being to the max and will sculpt the rower to his or her physical potential. But crew may be as much a mental game as a physical game. At the core of their beings, rowers are not quitters, they will not give in, and they are mentally able push themselves when they think they can’t draw another breath or endure the burn for another 250 meters or when they’re told they’re not good enough or cut out for the sport.
Watching our son become a rower from afar is my only experience with crew. I have seen him race only four times. I am no expert. I can’t discuss erg scores or split times or seat positions with any certainty, but I have seen miracles in confidence, tenacity, stature, sportsmanship, drive, and heart wrought by crew that outweigh all the other wonderful things he learned in the classroom. We didn’t know a thing about crew when we allowed our son to go to BS, but I can tell you now, at the end, that whatever our initial reasons to let him go, the lessons he’s learned from crew have trumped them.
I like the direction this thread has taken. Rather than focusing on the reason of letting kids go, the outcomes and experiences that could not be had in a local public school may be useful for an outsider.
Getting life long friends from all over the country and the world (rather than only from the same zip code) comes to my mind.
I feel high school friends are quite different from college friends. Anyone else feel that way?
@payn4ward : Agreed they are different. For me, college friendships tend to be less vivid, less essential. Maybe this is because high school friends knew you “before”, before you are an adult, before you became who you are now. College friends knew you as you are, just younger. High school friends are a link to that long ago, that far off half forgotten land we all came from. And the bonding that goes on amongst kids who live together through their HS years is in a league apart from college, no comparison really, imo. This is partly because boarding schools have sophisticated alumni networks that LPS lack but mostly I think boarding school life is more intense and memorable.
No question BS opens up all sorts of possibilities not available at the LPS: the mentorships, the travel programs, the variety of sports and clubs, the contacts. Mostly though, I’m for boarding schools because of the dimension of learning is deeper. Teaching and learning are not limited to tests and grades - they are in operation day and night, beyond the classroom, in the dining hall, around a pizza box in the dorms, walking back from the library. The kids learn to be self reliant, efficient, effective, learn a deeper level of social communication, community responsibility and a sense of the wider world. They walk out with self assurance. College is a next step, not a huge transition.
I rowed crew in college and have known many BS crew athletes heavily recruited at Ivy type schools due to crew. It definitely matters in some colleges. I found it a bit cultish in the negative sense, but I also loved being on the water and loved the motion of the boat. An absolutely fabulous book about crew, The Boys in the Boat, gives a sense of the teamwork involved.
I consider the exposure to crew to be a big plus of BS, but sadly, it’s still difficult at many locations. For many schools, crew requires not just the workout but the travel to/from boathouse that makes it much more time consuming than sports on the campus. Still, that’s more accessible than crew in many locations.
I love the exposure to sports at BS and how required physical activity is part of most school programs. I love that there are so many new things to try, and many levels of proficiency for many sports so newcomers can try things. And I love that kids are forced into the habit of hard intellectual work and hard physical work as a daily event. Sadly, in my own current life, there is much intellectual work, but I don’t get the hours of 3-5 free to do physical work. My choices are 4 or 5 a.m. or nothing, which means nothing too often. I’m glad my DS will get a chance to build physical skills and the habit of physical activity in big formative years.
@payn4ward: What, don’t you like debating whether or not supplemental CTY courses are a much better option than BS?
I do want to circle back on the sports at BS point. This has come up before and people thought I was CRAZY to suggest that sports even be a factor in selecting a school. Obviously I agree with Periwinkle’s statement that “it’s good to choose a school which would fit her even if she receives a career-ending injury in junior year”. You have to be able to answer the question “If your kid stopped playing that sport (due to injury, burnout, etc. would that school still be a good school for them?” with a YES.
That said, I’ll relate an anecdote about a family I met at the SPS revisit day years ago. It turned out that one of the families had a window sticker for the small PA prep school my wife and I went to…and I ran into the dad in the lobby of the hotel. HIs kid was not really a rower per se (he did cross-fit), but had notched some crazy good time in the Crash-Bs as a high school frosh (or soph?). I know that they were considering schools that would give the kid some access to on-water programs. Think he ended up at Lawrenceville (and a little online digging turned up that he is now rowing for Stanford).
And then, the case of my younger daughter (7D2)…attending The Masters School allows her to train at one of the top clubs in the country (located in NYC), to study with the former national team coach — and alongside college athletes, national team members, Olympians, and even a World Champion. She would not have that opportunity if she had stayed at home. Plus, she is able to compete at a scholastic level in a sport not offered by our local public school nor at her former K-12 private day school.
These are sort of outlier cases, admittedly, but I think are just as valid experiences as those “never tried sport X before BS” situations.
To Periwinkle’s point that “Crew is a sport few if any kids have had any exposure to before high school.” Really depends on where you live. If you happen to live in Mercer County, NJ or Bucks County, PA, there are at least two clubs where middle schoolers can and do experience rowing. And 7D2 has a friend at Masters who rowed in middle school somewhere in Florida.
I do have a question for you Periwinkle: In your post #106, I get the feeling that if you could do it all over again you you might not go the BS route? Did your kids not have a good time or tell you they missed being at home for the HS years? Do you regret not having your kids around for those years? Please correct me if I’m wrong in my reading of your post. (This is the part that made me think this: “In hindsight, had I to do it again, I would have found a solution to our problem, up to and including moving, two years earlier. Some things your kids only tell you when they’re adults.”)
If a rower is recruited from BS chances are they’re Club rowers, too. I’ve had three kids recruited for college rowing and a College Coach will almost always bypass a BS Coach if there’s a Club Coach involved. That fact shouldn’t take anything away from the many fine BS rowing programs out there… it’s just the way it is.
SevenDad: I think most, if not all, boarding school parents miss their children. This is the graduation time of year, so of course I’ve been saying this week, “it’s gone by so quickly.”
To be more precise, had I known how frustrating my eldest child’s public middle school years would be, I would have made a full court press to change schools. That effort would have run the gamut from moving to another public school district, to choosing a good private day school at the utmost edge of our commuting range. In some ways, the middle school frustrations were helpful, because it pushed us out of our comfort zone. It forced us to take a good hard look at what was happening in our local schools.
I am nostalgic for the public school culture we experienced back in the late '70s, at the tail end of the Sputnik era. Perhaps I was just there at the right time and the right place, but I received a fine education, which prepared me well for life. My parents did not need to make appointments with school administrators to plead with them for more challenging academic experiences. And yet, now, I know many parents who’ve made that trek to our local public school administrators. Most of the time, the answers they/we received were something along the lines of, “well, maybe your child needs challenge, but our hands are tied…”
With our experiences, I do believe in fit over all. Fit also applies to public schools. Our children and our family “fit” with the culture we’ve found at small independent boarding/day schools.
I would never send a child to boarding school who did not want to go. At the end of middle school, both my children wanted to go, and it was the right decision for them, and us. I am sad that it was necessary, even as I know that both children have had marvelous, transformative high school years.