Seems like the school should be asked to reassess their “off limits” policy. The BSs we visited all made it clear that the day students would be invited to all spaces including dorms. This is a shame and I am sorry your kid is going through it.
2 Likes
This. My sense is that most schools try very hard to integrate day and boarding students. @skieurope often posts that the only difference between them is where they lay their heads at night. Clearly, this is not the OP’s child’s case, and I’m very sorry to hear that. There have been some good suggestions upthread, and I’m glad that the rest of the student’s experience at this school is positive, but it does seem like the school itself has some work to do and needs to be made aware of specifics.
I wonder if the OP is comfortable naming the school, perhaps current parents and students at that school would chime in (or PM) and maybe assist the OP in making valid concerns known.
1 Like
Depending on how a school handled the 20-21 academic year, it could well have been an absolute wipeout in terms of social development and friendships (not to mention academics, athletics, mental health, etc etc etc ).
20-21 was our kids’ first year at their school. And it was really bad. Nearly 100% remote/zoom ‘teaching’ and extremely limited IRL interactions for the entire year. It was extremely rough on everyone but especially on those students entering that year, who of course did not yet have any existing support network at the school.
And, those “friendships” which did develop were so tenuous owed to the circumstances that they ultimately didn’t provide much of a base of support for many kids. At least not that we and our kids saw or experienced.
And then there’s the whole issue of being a day student at a boarding school. Obviously each school has their own % breakdown, and culture surrounding this. But the sad truth is that in terms of intergrating day and boarding students into a unified community, some schools make a very active, concerted, strong, and even successful effort to do so. Lawrenceville is a good example of this.
Other schools…not so much.
In your case OP, I agree with the others that the ‘off limits’ policy to even common areas within dorms is, frankly, insane. Not to mention actively exclusionary. Not only would I withhold financial support owed to this, I would make known explicitly my reason for doing so. I wonder if you couldn’t get a few other day student families to do the same.
5 Likes
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.
I’m sorry you thought you were buying something the school was not selling. Donations are just that—donations, not some quid pro quo for “promises.”
If anyone else is reading here thinking that their donations entitle them to something from the school other than good will, please leave those ideas at the door as you are sure to be disappointed.
It sounds like this school is not a good fit for your/child’s expectations and may be time to move on. There is no reason to stay with a school that is not providing what your child needs.
That is not at all what we felt.
In fact, we have never once mentioned donations there. Even when we were advised to mention it by people here, I share this only because it does hurt the school, behaving this way.
Also, the promises had nothing to do with the donations. We were told dorms had been closed for Covid. We waited for them to reopen. When they didn’t, we did withhold donations. That still seems fair to me.
I think supporting a community, in any way that you are able, is important, provided that community acts like you belong in it.
I just read this and am feeling very sorry to hear about your child’s experience. My son is a freshman day student attending a 70% boarding/ 30% day school. He is not an outgoing kid and in the summer even made an announcement to us that he wouldn’t be able to make a single friend in his high school. However, his school has really put in lots of effort to integrate day and boarding students into one community. Every day student has an assigned dorm for them to go to when they are on campus. He eats all three meals at school, and after dinner he hangs out at friends’ room or library and do homework together. We usually pick him up between 8-9 at night. His school has classes on Saturday mornings and sports competitions in the afternoons. Once in a while school has activities on Sundays, like a field day in September. We don’t feel there’s a distinct separation between day and boarding students. We barely see him except for Sundays when he spends at home with us.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 180 days after the last reply. If you’d like to reply, please flag the thread for moderator attention.