The Boarding School Solution

Three years ago, my husband and I decided to send our daughter Marina to high school on the East Coast, far from our home in California. Many of our friends were baffled. They would never send their sons or daughters away so young, they said. They would miss their children too much.

Our friends knew that Marina was in special education in middle school. But that didn’t seem to them to justify boarding school. Our daughter was pleasant, and she looked the same as the other kids—she wore the same ripped bluejeans with long T-shirts and downloaded the same hip-hop music. So what if she had a little trouble in math?

What our friends couldn’t see was that as time went on, Marina understood less and less of the material in her classes. Her public-school teachers were ill-equipped to help her. So after a full year of tests, consultants, school visits, and endless conversations around our dinner table, we made the very hard decision to send her 3,000 miles away to a high school focused on children with learning disabilities. Now, as she prepares to begin her senior year, we look back with some amusement at our angst over the decision. There’s no doubt that we made the right call.

I adopted Marina at the age of 3½ from Russia, where she had been in an orphanage since birth. When she arrived, she quickly absorbed words in her new language, tried new foods (everything from mussels to avocados), and charmed everyone in sight. My family and my eventual husband’s family welcomed her completely.

When Marina was 5 years old and evaluated for kindergarten, I was advised to hold off for a year. I enrolled her instead in a junior kindergarten program, essentially “practice” kindergarten. This seemed right: Give her a chance to take in more English and to experience more of the world around her, and she’d be fine. After all, she was still learning for the first time about such simple things as scissors and balloons.

But when she started real kindergarten, the teacher voiced concerns. Marina’s vocabulary was weak. She didn’t understand concepts of time, such as “tomorrow” vs. “yesterday.” She struggled with elementary math, and she was not paying attention in the classroom. I assumed that Marina still was just catching up. But my daughter realized before I did that something more was at play. Marina, now 18, remembers the first time she noticed she was different from the other kids, in first grade:

Everyone was assigned to do a coin-counting worksheet. I was able to count by fives and tens just fine, but when quarters were mixed in with other coins, it just got too hard to keep track. After some time, I was the only one left in the classroom, and I was very frustrated with myself because I just couldn't figure out how to add up the quarters with the rest of the coins. I was crying about how difficult it was for me to count up coins. It didn't seem too hard to do, but for some reason I just couldn't figure it out.

The school tested Marina to see if they could pinpoint a learning disability—dyslexia? autism?— that would qualify her for extra services like a speech pathologist or one-on-one tutoring. When I came in for a parent-teacher conference, the staff members happily announced that they had confirmed Marina’s eligibility for special-education services. I looked at them, crestfallen. They showed me a variety of tests such as picture vocabulary, shuffling cards to put them in the right order to make a story, and assessments of fine motor skills, on which she tested from average to very low. I should be happy, they explained, because not everyone qualifies for state-funded support.

I certainly wasn’t happy. I had never imagined my world as a mother being one of special education, extra tutoring, and individual education plans. But that’s what Marina’s life and mine would become.

By middle school, as the material in the classroom became more conceptual, Marina was placed in dedicated special-ed classes, instead of being tutored to supplement her mainstream classes, as she was in elementary school. By eighth grade, she was in all special-ed classes. As Marina remembers:

Middle school was definitely not the best time for me. The hardest part about it was the teachers. They didn’t have a lot of patience with kids, and got frustrated with me when I didn’t understand the directions of a certain assignment or the way to do the steps in a math problem. They never seemed to like it when I asked them questions more than once, so I didn’t bother asking for help any more.

Marina’s least favorite teacher, an older woman whom she nicknamed “the Crow,” had pretty much given up teaching the kids anything. She mainly harangued them to do better and disciplined them when they couldn’t. Marina came home one day to tell me that the teacher had pulled the hair of a classmate because he wasn’t paying attention. By eighth grade, the Crow was Marina’s teacher for almost half the day. Useful educational content was minimal. In science, for example, they had no labs, no dissections, no experiments, and no lessons; they seemed to do nothing but watch videos about science.

Little by little, Marina withdrew from school activities like basketball and chorus, and she sought refuge in her iPod. She was not disruptive in the classroom; in fact, teachers continued to report how pleasant she was. But we could tell that she was not happy, and she was becoming increasing isolated from the rest of the kids. As we looked ahead, we knew we needed a new kind of high school.

To figure out which high school near us would be the best fit, we hired a local consultant. She looked at Marina’s file and told us right away that we had to look at boarding schools. We said, just as our friends later would, “We’ll never send our daughter away for high school. We would miss her too much.” The consultant snorted. She suggested we look at the local alternatives and predicted we’d be back.

We started at our local public high school in Menlo Park, Calif., with its extensive special-ed services. They told us that the new “No Child Left Behind” Act dictated that they “teach to the test” rather than adapt material to individual needs. Since special-ed students are not exempted from NCLB’s requirement that schools teach algebra rather than basic math in order to qualify for public funds, Marina would be taking two hours of algebra each day—one in the regular class and one in the support classroom the school provided for special-ed students. Two hours of a subject that she shouldn’t be taking yet at all!

We turned next to the local private schools. Most targeted high achievers. A few targeted kids with behavior or substance abuse problems, which not only seemed like a poor fit for Marina, but might influence her in the wrong direction. There was one local special-education school, but it was tiny: only about 10 kids per grade and very few girls. It was housed in a ramshackle set of oddly connected buildings that reminded my husband of a rabbit warren. It felt like we were setting the bar too low.

Humbled, we returned to the consultant. She told us about a range of boarding schools, all on the East Coast, which has a longer tradition of sending kids away to school and more niche institutions. We put together a school tour for just my husband and me, without Marina, to see what the East had to offer.

At the third school we visited, Eagle Hill School in western Massachusetts, the admissions director showed us a classroom for “conceptual physics.” Four students were taking apart machines and learning the principles of physics as they experimented with moving gears rather than by making mathematical calculations. We also saw the science labs, where students did dissections and chemistry experiments. I thought about science with the Crow and then imagined Marina being able to take real science classes here. I found myself near tears.

Eagle Hill was expensive, but we were fortunate to be able to afford it. How, then, could we deny our daughter the opportunity to go to a school with small classes and a curriculum tuned to each student—a school we just hadn’t been able to find near home? Recalling her first visit, Marina says: “At Eagle Hill, I didn’t feel like I would be the only one who would have a hard time understanding the material in the classroom.” She wasn’t sure she wanted to go across the country. But she was willing to try it.

Now Marina is getting ready for her senior year at EHS, where she will, indeed, take conceptual physics. Although she continues to find academics difficult, she plans to go on to community college and perhaps to culinary school.

I asked Marina what she would tell a younger student whose family was considering boarding school, where both the parents and the kid were nervous about leaving home. She said, “If you go to a school like Eagle Hill, you will figure out what works for you and how you learn. If you don’t finish your work, the teachers have extra hours when you can go see them both in the morning and after school.” She talked about trying sports like fencing. And about how, among the groups of kids, “There isn’t a group that is better than you.”

I still find myself sad every time we put Marina back on United 172 to Boston. But I know now that as hard as it’s been for us to let her go, it would have been very selfish to make her stay.