transferring between boarding schools

etondad
Mon, 18 Mar 2013 01:12:30 +0000

Also please, please, please make sure that you are not conveying to the child that the school which has accepted him isn’t of sufficient quality (whatever that means anyway…). You need to be a cheerleader (yes, even if your heart isn’t completely into it…). Do everything you can to get your child excited about where he is going. Often that will be enough to get the emotional closure needed to move on.

The above posters have written about the frayed faculty/coach relationships --and while I think that happens much less than imagined–what does happen is that the transfer is not successful-- and then the student feel a double sting of rejection, and most problematically has internally alienated himself from where he is–and other kids can sense that a million miles away and unlike teachers are much less likely to overlook or forgive this “disloyalty” or perceived sense of “superiority” to the rest of the student body.

How horrible to waste the amazing resource that is the boarding school (of course if it a bad or harmful fit-- then get him out–NOW–and do what you need to do-- public school, homeschool if you must) because of the green monster of envy that alas never leaves some kids. Also from a practical point the child will be applying to college before too long-- who gets a better set of rec-- the involved and committed student/community member or the morose alienated kid? That is pretty obvious-- so it isn’t in the kid’s short or longer best interests in most cases to encourage such speculation.

Think of this in many respects like a suitor carrying a torch for a rejected love. How often doe that suitor return back into a healthy relationship with the former s.o. and how often does carrying the torch make the kid less able to move on and meet someone wonderful. I’d say much more the later than the former. It is the same with schools.