August 6, 2010
A lot goes into choosing a prep school
by Braden Campbell/
Chase Collegiate has long been a top prep destination in New England.
Every spring, thousands of New England seniors glue themselves to their mailboxes as they await the arrival of that big envelope, the symbolic culmination of their years spent toiling in the classroom.
They walk the halls of their high schools as proud envoys to adulthood. They count the minutes between accepting their high school diploma and taking their first seat on a stiff dorm room bed.
Nick Gorrasi, star attackman at Sandwich High School on Cape Cod, will take part in the ritual next spring, only he won’t be looking towards college. Gorrasi will be awaiting acceptance into a prep school.
Nick – who has attracted interest from college coaches after scoring more than 125 points in his Sandwich varsity career -- is planning to take a post-graduate year, extra semesters of academic and athletic development before college that his parents hope will give him an edge over his peers in finding and getting in to the right university setting.
“It’s primarily an academic thing, but it’s definitely going to help him physically because he’s still growing,” said Mike Gorrasi, Nick’s father and a one-time professional player with the Boston Blazers. “I think another year is certainly going to help him out.”
There are two routes to prep school, undergrad and post-grad, and each one has different appeals for different students. Nick, who plays in the elite New England Select Lacrosse League, has been surrounded by peers and coaches who have gone the prep-school route and reaped the benefits. That put the idea in his head.
While his parents would have sent him to prep school early, Nick decided on the post-grad route, so that he can finish with his friends and teammates at Sandwich. That way, he does the normal track at home, but gets an extra year to mature, make himself a better college candidate, and maybe take advanced-placement classes to enter college a few credits ahead. So while his senior teammates are looking at colleges, Nick is visiting prep schools.
Just like with a college search, the key to getting the most out of a prep-school education is finding a good match, both in and out of the classroom. For students who grow up in the public-school system with no choice, this is a decision not to be made lightly.
“If you’re going to public school, you don’t really think about that ‘What’s this school like? What are these students like?’” said Aline Rossiter, Director of Marketing and Enrollment at Chase Collegiate School in Connecticut. “With the independent school market or the private school market, each school is different.”
Rossiter recommends that students make several trips to a school and become acquainted with faculty members in order to get a better idea of just what kind of environment they’re committing to.
John Brubaker, the coach of the boys’ lacrosse team at Kents Hill School in Maine said that the rigors of a year at prep school are a preview of — and good preparation for — the collegiate athletic routine.
“The biggest thing that I can offer a prospective student-athlete at Kents Hill is the opportunity to be promoted to play at the next level,” he said. “I have a well-established network I can refer kids to. We run our athletic program in many respects like a college program. … We offer the focus that you will get in your primary sport when you go to college.”
Though prep schools do turn out quite a few top athletic recruits each year, their academic and artistic programs are often just as strong, if not stronger than, the sports programs. Often, those other disciplines are the real draw.
Just as colleges tend to lean toward the most well-rounded students, so too do prep schools, and they offer their students the ability to further hone their varied skills in a stimulating environment. Rossiter said the typical Chase student excels in several areas.
“Students are meeting what we call the three A’s: athletics, academics, and the arts; we seek a real balance between those three,” she said. “Often you might have the captain of the baseball team also singing in the musical, and that’s really important.”
While Nick Gorrasi decided that he’d rather finish at Sandwich High before going off for a prep year, many others believe that spending several years in the prep-school environment gives them the surest path to success.
Ned Philie’s family – also from Sandwich, Mass. -- has a prep-school tradition that’s continuing in his youngest generation, and without any stops at the local high school. His eldest sons, Drew – who was the University of Vermont’s top scorer as a freshman in 2010 -- and Adam, who is entering Deerfield Academy as a sophomore this fall, went away to prep school starting in the eighth grade. Both boys started at the Cardigan Mountain School, a junior boarding school in New Hampshire, before moving to Deerfield. Philie’s daughter Alex, a Deerfield graduate, will attend Amherst College this fall. For all three, lacrosse was a big part of their campus life.
Philie and his kids decided early on that spending their whole career at prep school – rather than just taking a post-grad year -- was their best choice. To them, the positives of a long-term concentration in the prep-school environment make it more beneficial than spending just a year there.
“We wanted them to feel they immersed themselves in it,” said the Philie patriarch. “My older kids went to a school that’s big with a lot of post-grads, and sometimes the ‘PGs’ didn’t have the same draw or gain the same sense of community that my kids did.”
The youngest members of the Philie Clan, 10-year-old Austin and eight-year-old Aidan haven’t reached prep-school age yet, but their father is confident that they’ll follow in their siblings’ footsteps.
While prep school does have its benefits, it can have as many drawbacks; it depends on both the institution and the student as to whether private-school education is a plus or a handicap.
The idea of sending kids away to school at age 14, rather than the typical college age of 18 is daunting for both parents and children; many kids just haven’t attained the necessary maturity level to handle both the workload and the highly regimented lifestyle.
“If you need someone to look over your shoulder to ensure that you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing, it’s probably not the right place,” said Winston Miller, assistant director of admissions at Williston-Northampton in Massachusetts. “The students here like making their own decisions, not having someone all over them all the time.”
That said, many schools facilitate their students’ assimilation into the prep routine. At Williston-Northampton, for example, Miller said the entire freshman year is an orientation process. When students arrive in the fall, they go away for a weekend retreat. Throughout the year, the school brings in speakers to talk about such issues as being away from home and time management, and each student attends mandatory weekly meetings with advisers.
Though not all schools have an identical procedure, those practices are fairly standard. Couple that with the intimate environment and small class sizes, and it’s hard to get lost in the shuffle.
The next caveat comes in the form of expense. The average national cost of a senior year at a boarding school last year was $40,790 according to the National Association of Independent Schools. Day schools, like Chase Collegiate, were significantly less expensive – with an average cost of $20,995 – but hardly come cheap.
The NAIS runs the independent school financial-aid process through a program called School & Student Services, which asks parents to fill out a tax-based need assessment. The SSS then sends its recommendation to schools of your choice, though the ultimate aid decision is made by the individual school. Last year’s average grant was $12,003.
Myra McGovern, the NAIS’ director of media relations, said she encourages people to apply to several schools in order to maximize the chance for a large aid package.
“It depends a lot on the size of [a school’s] financial-aid budget, their philosophy about awarding things like that,” she said. “We say it pays to apply to more than one school because different schools can offer substantially different amounts of aid.”
The first step towards attending prep school is research.
There are numerous resources available both online and on bookshelves; nais.org and boardingschoolreview.com are invaluable tools. Students will have to take either the SSAT or ISEE in order to determine their aptitude.
Most prep schools have an application deadline in mid-January and a financial-aid deadline a month later. From that point, students often visit and conduct interviews before making their final decision.
For those students lucky enough to find the right confluence of philosophy, academics, athletics and finance in a prep school, it’s an opportunity to score lifetime goals, the kind of thing that lingers long after the student’s lacrosse-playing days are up.
