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| Private Education |
Embracing Our Alternatives
Peter Meyers
05/03/2004
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Margaret Miller, a producer at the Discovery Channel, comes from a family that
prizes a first-rate private school education. While her father served as United
States Ambassador to Tanzania and Zimbabwe in the 1980s, her sister went to St.
George’s School and her brother to Andover. She followed their lead and began
ninth grade at the elite National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C. She hated
it, partly because she missed Africa and partly because she had a hard time
breaking into long-established cliques. Much more to her taste was the Colorado
Rocky Mountain School, but it was a tough sell to her parents. “In my family,”
says Miller, 31, “anything west of the Mississippi you couldn’t take
seriously.”
Miller eventually carried the day when she visited the school
with her mother, who saw firsthand that its unique approach—combining outdoor
activities with a conventional education—perfectly complemented her daughter’s
personality. Miller, who transferred to Colorado Rocky Mountain in her second
year of high school, is not alone. Each year families whose children might
ordinarily consider what some educational consultants loosely refer to as the
“Big Ten”—the St. Pauls, Choates and Exeters of the boarding school world—seek
alternatives that better suit the child’s interests and temperament, as well as
the family’s values.
Fortunately—at least at the high school level—options
abound, ranging from schools that train artistically gifted children to those
that enable students to combine travel with study. We, as parents, must identify
which schools have adopted a unique approach that attracts our child and us,
while at the same time focusing on the core values that form the heart of any
exceptional education. In assembling the following selection of outstanding
schools, our staff consulted high school guidance counselors, educational
consultants and families whose children have attended these schools. All of the
alternative schools featured here offer boarding facilities.
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