13 Can't Miss Tips to Get Into Your Dream School

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

Editor's note:

I asked Attorney Sara Goldsmith Schwartz, whose "practice is focused on the critical issues facing school administrators and leadership," to answer my questions and provide some general guidance regarding best practices for enrollment agreements. This article is intended for the information of owners, administrators, and trustees of small to medium size private schools. ~ Rob Kennedy

The relationship between parents, students, and the school is determined by contract law. Can you tell us what that means?

The relationship between parents, students, and the school is based on a lot of documents, including the student/parent handbook, the code of conduct, the enrollment agreement, and more. The enrollment agreement, however, is the only legal contract, and it memorializes the relationship between the parents, students, and the school, binding the parties to the terms and conditions laid out in the agreement. The agreement assists schools in collecting tuition and fees in cases of non-payment and in assessing late fees in cases of late payment. However, a comprehensive agreement addresses far more than tuition and fees.

This short clip explains why contracts are important legal documents.

How can a professionally written enrollment agreement prevent litigation in the future?

A properly drafted enrollment agreement is a cornerstone of a school’s risk management strategy. For instance, it can help deter parents from bringing claims against the school, as well as help the school prevail on such claims.

An enrollment agreement

Editor's Note: I asked John Gulla, the Executive Director of the E.E. Ford Foundation to answer some questions about the Foundation's work specifically, and independent school philanthropy in general. I am grateful to him for his thoughtful responses. Rob Kennedy

Preamble

JG: One does not have to read Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century, though I do strongly recommend it, to understand the challenges of late-stage capitalism and the concentration of wealth. Half of the world's wealth is now controlled by less than 1% of the population. Put another way, the wealth of the top 1% equals the wealth of the other 99%. Viewed slightly differently, fewer than 100 individuals own as much as the poorest half of the world's population. This is not the place for a discussion of how this has come about or the challenges it represents, but I think that the data provide a prima facie case for the increasing role of Private Foundations in the years ahead.

RK: What was Edward E. Ford hoping to accomplish by establishing his foundation?

JG: The current mission of the Foundation is to "strengthen and support independent secondary schools and to challenge and inspire them to leverage their unique talents, expertise and resources to advance teaching and learning throughout this country by supporting and disseminating best practice, by supporting efforts to develop and implement models of

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