Does it makes sense to consider boarding school?

allyphoe
Mon, 29 Dec 2014 23:07:59 +0000

Thanks! Yes, we’re 6 hours by plane or 2-3 days by car from either coast, so travel logistics would make it a big commitment to a nearly-complete unknown.

DD is still at the developmental stage where she prefers her challenges spoon-fed, if that makes sense. She changed swim teams this year, from a team where she could spend most of practice hanging out and chatting with her friends, to one where she spends the entire practice working. And while she was strongly in favor of the switch after a trial week with the new team, specifically because she liked the higher expectations, she hadn’t been complaining at all about pool time being social time! She’s happy when a teacher requires a particularly challenging assignment, but she’s mostly uninterested in optional challenges. She is very much the kid who, if 89.6% and 103% look identical on report cards and transcripts (which they do in our school), and she’s still somewhere in that range, whatever she chose to do or not do was good enough. Her favorite activity is being individually tutored in music theory, and her teacher is getting ready to start AP/college level work with her because DD wants more, so it’s not that she minds a challenge; she minds being challenged while other people are getting away with less.

I suspect the work will be harder in high school, but not enough harder. Every parent I’ve talked to has gone out of their way to assure me that the work isn’t too hard, and the pace isn’t too fast, and the expectations aren’t too high. The kids who are highest-performing (and our district is big enough that there are multiple kids in her grade and possibly at her middle school who are ahead of her in one or more areas) are afterschooled or take summer classes, which would just compound the “bored during school, not enough downtime out of school” issue.

Her middle school offers all the extracurriculars you mentioned, and she has zero interest in them! She has two sports (one not offered at school; one would take up an elective period and electives are her favorite classes) and two music activities (theory + private lessons on two instruments) in addition to school music, plus some one-off things.

I think her ideal scenario would be one-on-one tutoring (not from me - we tried that, and it was an unmitigated failure - and the local homeschool group has more religious-related issues than day school would) plus mostly-unsupervised downtime with friends every day, but the logistics of that are more awful to contemplate than having her gone for months on end would be.

There’s just no perfect, alas! I’m still not sure what the least-worst alternative is, but your comments were helpful.