The Boarding School Solution

Photograph of Donna and Marina Dubinsky courtesy of the authors.

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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: