Strategic School Choices

As you begin thinking about private schools, you will add schools from various sources to your initial list of potential schools. That’s fine. Accept all suggestions and advice in the early stages of your search for the right school or schools. Friends will suggest schools which their children attend. Family will mention schools that your uncle or aunt attended. And so on. Finally, you will explore on your own. Private School Review is a great place to start because the site is devoted to private K-12 schools. The following screenshot gives you an idea of the number of schools within a fifty-mile radius of East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. (I selected that area because I am familiar with it as I have family there. Also, it is not a major urban area.)

After exploring schools and including all the other suggestions you will receive, you will most likely end up with a list of 5-10 schools. Now, this is where the private school search process becomes tricky. Why is that? Simply because you have to whittle that long list of potential schools down to a more manageable list of 2-3 schools. Selecting a school is not like buying a watch on Amazon. It’s a lot like buying a house. And just as with buying a house, you have to really like the house. You also have to convince yourself that it meets all your

15 Reasons To Go To St. Swithins

When it comes to choosing the right educational environment for your child, private schools offer a unique set of benefits that can foster academic excellence, personal growth, and future success.

From smaller class sizes to rigorous academic programs, private schools provide a tailored education that can help your child thrive.

As you zero in on the best private school for your child, keep this list of reasons for doing so handy.

• The question you need to keep asking yourself is whether the fit is right for each of these attributes.
• You may not score 10 out of 10, but try to get as close as you can.
• Scoring these items is obviously a subjective matter that depends on your needs and requirements.
• Remember that the schools that come closest to matching your requirements are the ones to which you should probably apply.

Finding the right school is a complex process with numerous moving parts.

• If you get one of these factors wrong, it won't kill the deal.
• It could, however, make your child's experience less than optimal.

Here, then, are fifteen reasons why we think you should consider our school.

1. School size

Most preschools and nursery schools typically have a student population of 75-100 students. Schools offering kindergarten through grade eight usually have a population of 200-500 students. As you search for schools on Private School Review, you will notice

As I prepared to write this article about searching for private K-12 schools, I had a flashback to the fall of 1986 when we started looking at schools for our eldest daughter. There was no email or internet back then, at least that the general public had access to. We knew friends who had gone to private school. At one point I had interviewed to be the Music teacher at a New England boarding school. But that was it. That was all we knew about private high schools. Reaching further back into my memory bank, I remember enrolling our eldest daughter in the now-defunct St. Peter's by-the-sea Day School when it first opened in 1971. When we moved to Garden City, we enrolled her in the Waldorf School of Garden City. These two decisions were fairly easy because we knew the schools which came highly recommended by family and friends. No email or web searches were possible, nor were they needed.

Back to our 21st-century private school search. We have some very powerful tools available to us. Unfortunately, these tools can produce results that can be misleading, confusing, or, at worst, useless. Search engines require us to filter the data carefully to eliminate information that we don't need. Useful results depend on the manner in which you word the search terms. Happily, this is not the case with the Private School Review search engine. Our programmers have set up the fields you need to search our

Here is another way of looking at the private school search process. This checklist highlights the main tasks in what is, for most of us, an eighteen to twenty-month-long project. While circumstances will occasionally require you to do everything in a rush at the last minute, we will review progress from the point of view of the more customary time frame. Work transfers or some other event requiring you to move to a new city never happen conveniently, do they? When you have to find a private school quickly, you will have to telescope the full-length search into a few months. That is doable, and I discuss how to handle that situation in Is It Too Late To Apply? In the meantime, let's review the five signs that you are on the right track in your private school search process.

You have scanned dozens of private school websites.

In step one, you look at as many private school websites as possible. Start with the powerful search engine right here on Private School Review. We have over 27,000 schools in our database. As a result, you should be able to find plenty of material. The only filters which you might want to use at this early stage are the following: kind of school, i.e., religious, military, and special needs; and the grades offered. Before you start searching, determine the kind of school which you want for your child. If you are looking for

Use this five-point checklist to keep your search for private schools organized. If you ask your friends and family who have gone through the process of finding private schools for their children about their experiences, you will probably hear that the search is not difficult. On the other hand, it is time-consuming, has several deadlines, and can be demanding, particularly if you and your spouse have full-time careers. Before long, somebody will create an app to help you keep your private school search in order. In the meantime, use this simple checklist.

1. Look at schools.

"Cast your net as wide as you can." "Think outside the box." Sorry to bombard you with cliches, but they are the best suggestions which I can offer. Thinking outside the box is not always easy for us parents to do. We know our children so very well. That's a given. But some of us tend to be overly-protective, and we worry a lot. "She'll never do well in that school. Helen's son had a terrible time there." Force yourself to explore schools that you might not have put on your list, for one reason or another.

As the following video illustrates, schools will put their best foot forward as they want you to consider them and, better yet, visit them.

This part of the school search process can be great fun. Why? Because most private