Private School to Boarding School

soxmom
Mon, 29 Apr 2013 10:08:30 +0000

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.