Boarding Schools

The Boarding School Option
Boarding Schools are Alive and Well in the Midwest,
But are They Right for Your Child – and You?

November 01, 2006

Jeff Schafer

A student clicks "send," letting her parents know she has a ride home for Thanksgiving and hurries to class, lugging her computer and books Quasimodo-style on a brick path between buildings choked by ivy. Other backpacked students pick up the pace from dorm to class when they hear the clock tower announce they are late.

This isn't college; it's boarding school. For hundreds of years, boarding schools have been teaching youngsters in educational and cultural cocoons all over the world. In the United States, more than 240 accredited boarding schools enroll high school students only. Currently, 42,203 high school-aged students are enrolled in those schools. That's about one tenth of one percent of high school students in the country.

In the U.S., boarding schools are much more prevalent in the Northeast than here in the Midwest. In Indiana and Ohio, there are eight private boarding schools committed to teaching young men and women reading, writing, and leadership skills. By comparison, tiny Massachusetts dwarfs Indiana and Ohio with 34 independent boarding schools.

Don't let the Midwest's paucity of boarding schools fool you into underestimating the relevance of the boarding system here in the heartland. Little ol' Hoosier and Buckeye boarding schools are alive and well, and kicking out recently-appointed United States Supreme Court Chief Justices, thank you very much.

Boarding school may be a harder sell here than in the Northeast, but that's okay. Of the boarding schools we spoke with, the largest enrollments were at The Culver Academies in Culver, Indiana, and Gilmour Academy in Gates Mills, Ohio. At a whopping total reported enrollment of 767 and 760, respectively, these schools can afford to be picky. And they are.

Boarding schools are not a refuge for kids who are thrown out of school for disciplinary reasons, says John Buxton, Head of Schools at The Culver Academies in Culver, Indiana. "That's not our model. It's very competitive to get in, it's just hard to get in."

Many boarding school kids are bright boys and girls who were not motivated by their public school curriculum; thus, they're underachievers. Brent Smith, Director of Admissions at Indiana's Howe Military School suggests that, "Because of the structure and the 24/7 curriculum, they do real well at boarding school."

According to Smith, "The typical boarding school student is a bright young man or woman who is not working to his potential. The public schools are so large—Carmel [High School in Carmel, Indiana] has 4000 kids now— and it's easy for a kid to fall through the cracks at a Carmel or a Ben Davis or a Center Grove. It's real easy. So there are a lot of kids that do fall through the cracks.

When so many Fortune 500 CEOs are boarding school graduates, boarding schools can look like uber-schools cranking out the next great race of societal saviors (or at least business moguls, keeping global corporations afloat to fund our 401k's). Can it be that, to paraphrase Will Rogers, boarding schools never met a student they couldn't make successful?

"I wish we could say that," chuckles Smith. "But sometimes a student may have a psychological issue or they won't abide by the school's rules." On the other hand, Smith has seen a lot of kids that begin with mediocre grades and then pull them up.

Part of that has to do with the schools' small enrollments. For example, Olney Friends School in Barnsville, Ohio, has a coed enrollment of approximately 70. Willoughby, Ohio's Andrews School is an all-girl boarding school. Its enrollment is 136 this year. And coed La Lumiere School in LaPorte, Indiana, has an enrollment of around 140.

As a result of its smaller size, "a La Lumiere education truly is a customized education," Headmaster Michael Kennedy says. "When we can customize a program, and there's a distinction between being everything for all people and being everything for all students, from a curricular standpoint, and from an activity and athletic standpoint, we've been successful with the majority of our students. We educate the whole child," concludes Kennedy, "and we do it well."

Enrollment at boarding schools has fluctuated. Historically, at Howe Military School in Howe, Indiana, which last year enrolled 152 students, enrollment increased until Vietnam. "Vietnam was the watershed of big enrollment at military school," says Howe Military's Smith. "We're all in different levels of enrollment since Vietnam."

Buxton, on the other hand, notes that "institutions in general took a hit in the seventies with double-digit inflation and the social revolution. All boarding schools got hit hard, not just military schools. When inflation was 16 and 17 per cent, it was hard for families to afford boarding school."

But there is a payoff for the time, money, and effort of attending a boarding school.

It shouldn't surprise anyone that in campus arboreta all over the country, folks have been hiding behind trees with clipboards, counting. The Association of Boarding Schools (TABS) recently commissioned a study to examine the relative value, to the extent there is one, of the boarding school experience. The survey included 2700 current students and graduates of three categories of schools: boarding schools (1000 students and alumni), public schools (1100), and private day schools, including parochial and independent day schools (600). The interviewees were high school seniors, recent college graduates (25-26 years old), mid-career-level professionals (38-39 years old) and late-career-level professionals (58-59 years old).

Measuring markers such as opportunities for leadership, earning advanced degrees, exposure to diverse races and cultures and the like, the results were uniformly favorable to boarding schools. For example, 44 percent of boarding school graduates state they have achieved top-management positions by mid-career, compared with 33 percent of private day school grads and 27 percent of public high school grads.

Among other things, the study asked why students attended boarding schools. Was it a matter of good luck and good riddance as suggested in movies such as The Sound of Music and Disney's The Parent Trap?

According to boarding school grads, that's not the case. Sixty percent of respondents to the TABS survey reported that the primary reason they applied to boarding school was for the opportunity to receive a better education, not because they were being sent away.

In fact, if you want to dump your kids, boarding schools don't want 'em. School administrators mince no words when it comes to reasons to enroll your child in a boarding school.

Boarding schools "actually allow for the implementation of a 24/7 curriculum," says Smith. "Because if you think about it, if a child is living at your school, then you can work on values and studies. We feel that you can really integrate your school curriculum into a child's life easier in a boarding environment."

Buxton understands that "Parents know what they want and they want everything. What they want is a curriculum that is going to be incredibly demanding and high level but they want to make sure that their kids get all A's and can go to Harvard." He chuckles. "And they want athletic teams that are coached at an Olympic level, but they want to make sure their kids make the team. They're parents and they care a lot about their kids and they are their most precious asset.

"And the really clever ones," continues Buxton, "I mean the really informed and enlightened ones figure out that they've got to let their kids work out some of these situations on their own. And the not-so-informed ones feel they need to manage every aspect of their children's lives. That doesn't work so well.

"Boarding schools are wonderful places for families who have children who are not having their needs met in their current environment," he says. "And that could be a large suburban high school of 5000, where the kids are just moving along with the beat of whatever the dominant theme is for the school and a kid who, with more attention and more support, could be a top-notch student or a top-notch athlete who really isn't getting a chance because the current is just pulling him along."

While boarding schools have enjoyed positive exposure from the Harry Potter children's literature series, La Lumiere School is making hay out of the rise to prominence of graduate John G. Roberts, Jr., Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

La Lumiere Headmaster Kennedy says "students that have come from larger schools have found this to be a great place for them because they are connected, because they have a voice in the classroom, because they went from being a small fish in a big pond to starting on the varsity soccer team. All these things contribute to a positive schooling experience."

Intuitively, one thinks that being away from home during high school might prepare a student for some of the facets of college life that can't be taught from a book, things like self-control, perspective, and standing on your own two feet.

"We've learned from different literature that there is a real need for an adolescent moratorium where, essentially, it's a psychosocial moratorium," says Meg Short, Director of Admissions at Olney Friends School, an academically challenging college prep school in Barnsville, Ohio. "They need time out to be a teenager within safe boundaries where you can learn to grow and develop intellectually, socially, morally, spiritually. And the boarding school is an ideal environment in which to go through that psychosocial moratorium that the psychologists and educational theorists have described over the years."

Recent data supports her point. The TABS study reports that 78 percent of boarding school graduates say they were "very well prepared for the non-academics of college life." Those aspects included time management, independence, and social life. Private day school grads fared less well, at 36 percent, and public high school grads even less, at 23 percent.

Those numbers won't surprise Smith. "Boarding education is a smooth transition to college," he says. "When you're in college, you're on your own. You graduate from school and whammo, you're at Bloomington and suddenly you can drink beer and eat pizza and chase girls all the time. And there are no rules. Well, at boarding school we're still strict. We still have rules, So rather than just leaving home quickly, they've had a chance to break away gradually, living on their own, learning how to study, learning how to make some of those day-to-day decisions on their own."

"The kids have fun. It's hard, but it's rewarding, and kids respond well to that," says Buxton.

Moreover, Smith stresses that "boarding schools are very diverse." In fact, 59 percent of boarding school students say that their school has students from many races and ethnic groups, compared with 39 percent of public school students and only 19 percent of private day school students.

That certainly is the case at Culver, where Buxton reports that its 767 students come from 38 states and 25 different countries. "It's incredibly diverse," he says, "with a waiting list of 95 to 100."

Boarding schools offer an opportunity to be immersed in vigorous academic, athletic, and leadership pursuits. And when boarding school students report they spend 17 hours per week on homework compared with eight or nine at other schools, or that boarding school students watch three hours of television per week compared with seven, it's an option worth considering.

Jeff Schafer is an Indianapolis area freelance writer, father of five, and husband of one. He writes about anything and everything. He writes children's books just for fun.