Checklist For Comparing Schools

Many parents agonize over sending their teenagers to boarding school or keeping them at home and sending them to day school. The issue you really need to address is the quality of supervision you are able to give your children after school and on weekends. Let's face it, modern parents lead very busy professional and social lives. If you aren't around to see what's going on, do you know what your teen is up to?

The Advantage of Going to Boarding School

When you send your child to boarding school, you are buying the whole package: academics, athletics, social life, extracurricular activities and 24/7 supervision all rolled into one. That's just part of the boarding school DNA. It is an incredibly good deal for many thoughtful parents. Of course, she will miss her mother and father, her siblings, her own room, and all those other special things she knows and loves. But, the truth is that she will be off to college anyway in a few years. Getting a head start on leaving home is not a bad thing. It will pay huge dividends in later years as she has had to learn to cope and adjust to new circumstances at an earlier stage in her life. Teaching her to be independent is a good thing.

Living in a boarding school essentially prevents your child from being anonymous. She will be part of the school community. She will be engaged in its activities, academics, and athletics. She will be

Sometimes things don't go exactly as you'd like. For any number of reasons you find yourself starting the school search process really late. Perhaps you have been transferred and are suddenly faced with finding a place for your child. It's May and the move is planned for July. You need a place for the fall. And fast. What do you do?

Contact Schools.

Contact the schools directly and see if a place is available. Phone the admissions department as soon as you can. That assumes, of course, that you know the schools in the area to which you are relocating. But what if you don't? What if you simply don't have time to do all that careful research? The solution is to hire an educational consultant to do the work for you. Consultants know private schools and have the contacts to find a place for a qualified student.

This video deals with the issue of missed deadlines. While it talks about college admission deadlines, the same principles apply to private schools.

You May Be in Luck If There Are Places.

Back to the original question: what if you have missed the deadlines for entry next fall? You probably will be out of luck when it comes to the most competitive schools. But there are plenty of very good schools which have rolling admissions or no fixed admissions deadline. In other words, they admit qualified

The question and answer on the Bay Area Private Schools site says it all:

Q. Is there a ranking on California private schools?

A. There is no ranking on private elementary schools. Since the key to rewarding private school education is finding a good match for your child's specific needs, parents should not make their decision solely based on test scores and reputation.

So, the answer to every parent's question "Which is the best school for my child?" is a very ambiguous attorney's answer: "It depends!" What does it depend on? It depends on your requirements.

This video offers an overview of Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C.

What are your requirements?

You and your child will have different requirements, of course. You will be looking at test scores of a school's graduates, the colleges to which they matriculate, the quality of the faculty, how competitive the admissions are, and so on. Typical adult benchmarks.

She's more concerned with what kind of kids go to the school, what her social life will be like, whether she can bring her horse to school, how much homework there is, and how difficult the work is. Typical teenage concerns.

What you must do to determine the best school for your child is to examine and discuss all the things which matter to you both. This is not a discussion that can take place while stopped at a traffic light

In the 19th and early part of the 20th centuries Friedrich Froebel, Maria Montessori and Rudolf Steiner were trailblazers in early education. Their ideas and philosophies shaped early childhood education as we know it in the 21st century. Who were these people? Why did they feel that early education was so important?

Freidrich Froebel

Freidrich Froebel (1782-1852) invented kindergarten which literally means a child's garden. Froebel wanted children to interact with their surroundings. Interacting with nature was central to his philosophy of education. He believed that interacting with nature would lead children in a closer examination of how things work. Froebel was influenced by the Swiss pedagogue Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746-1827) whose methods and approach to education, in turn, shaped a young Albert Einstein when he attended the local school in Aarau. Today few people with the exception of educators or trivia buffs know who Froebel is even though his influence in early childhood education was profound.

From left to right: Friedrich Froebel; Dr. Maria Montessori; Rudolf Steiner

One of the features of Froebel's approach to teaching children was the use of gifts. He developed five gifts which were to be given to the child in ascending order. The gifts were designed to teach awareness of shapes, spatial relationships, and many more concepts to even the youngest child.

This video offers an overview of Froebel.