I wanted to provide an update to this old post before it was closed.
They never reopened dorms at my students school and gathering remained a challenge all four years. Not only for my student, I know of boarding students that found this isolation difficult as well. Sometimes the kid you want to spend time with isn’t your roommate.
My student is ok, now, and they far exceeded educational goals, so I suppose the school met its mission to educate.
As for support of the school, we very much wanted to be supportive. We had at first restricted donations, we gave over 25k in the first four months as a new family, then we waited patiently for promises to be fulfilled, the following year we gave far less as things we were told weren’t happening, last year we gave almost nothing. Those numbers should have grown each year given the rest of the experience, parts of which really were extraordinary. The effects of the isolation and exclusion of the program on the health of my student over these years has been impossible to ignore.
Behavior like this is wrong and unsupportable by parents.
I’m sharing this today, because I think that as people are visiting, looking at all these high schools, hoping for a good experience for their kids, specific questions about day and boarding students ability to gather together and the importance of community may want to be asked. We were blindsided by this, it feels like the least I can do is make sure others are not.