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Peruse a list of professional organizations, networks and advocates all engaged in the support and advancement of the boarding school community.
From the Desk of Pete Upham, TABS Executive Director
OUT OF A MOUNTAIN OF DESPAIR, A STONE OF HOPE
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by Ross Peters | Vice President of School Strategy, EXPLO Elevate Originally published on EXPLO Elevate. Educators love words—knowing them, using them, stretching them, and even at times, creating them. There have been instances in our work that we have c...
Read MoreOur Associate Membership program is designed for those individuals and organizations - not eligible for traditional membership - which serve, study, or otherwise are deeply involved in the TABS community of schools.
Archbishop Riordan High School
San Francisco, California, USA
TABS
Asheville, North Carolina, USA
The Bishop Strachan School
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Bement School
Deerfield, Massachusetts, USA
Captives allow owners to put their premiums to work and control and mitigate risk, while taking advantage of certain tax protections that are available, but bringing these benefits to reality is a team effort. The best captives are supported by teams with a unified mission and purpose, rather than teams that are purely transactional.
– says Geoff Still, Vice President of TABS Insurance and Vice President of Finance & Operations at TABS.
See the complete article at captiveinternational.com
Dear Colleagues,
As we welcome the exhilaration of autumn, it gives me great pleasure to announce a dynamic new initiative, TABS Boarding School Alliance Partnership program, and to name the program’s inaugural Alliance Partners: Carney, Sandoe & Associates, Community Brands, and Marts & Lundy.
Over the last year, TABS invited a handful of best-in-class companies, with a history of service to schools, to join us in multi-year cooperative agreements as Boarding School Alliance Partners (BSAPs). Through this new venture, TABS will be engaging with these industry leaders to pursue novel analysis and research, co-produce white papers, offer best practice guidance, and collaborate on other special projects.
The new program improves the association’s capacity to offer thought leadership across a variety of areas important to the health and vitality of boarding schools. We’ll be able to deliver more—at no extra cost—to our member schools. In fact, each founding Alliance Partner is making a significant investment in the work of the association.
Carney, Sandoe & Associates, Community Brands, and Marts & Lundy have each demonstrated a high and sustained commitment to the boarding school community by seeking to understand current and evolving school needs, and by cultivating long-term relationships of enduring impact. We are thrilled with the fresh enthusiasm and innovation they bring to the TABS table, and we look forward to doing more on your behalf in the coming years.
I invite you to take a few minutes to hear from each of our partners by viewing this video. I’m also including a press release here.
Please be in touch should you be interested in sharing your thoughts.
Sincerely,
Pete Upham
Executive Director | TABS
“The Council on Standards for International Educational Travel Advisory board has announced the launch of a set of model standards to guide F-1 secondary student recruitment efforts, which centre on the areas of stewardship, transparency, engagement and partnership…”
See the full article in The PIE NEWS: The PIE News – US Secondary School Agencies Partner to Define Model Standards
According to Brookings Institution, currently about a quarter of all schools are private and enroll approximately 12 percent of the school age population. Within the private school sector, 36 percent of schools are Catholic, although the number of students attending Catholic schools is less than half what it was a century ago; 39 percent are other religious schools with evangelical schools growing the fastest; and 24 percent are non-sectarian schools. Boarding schools fit into this last sector and constitute a small slice of the pie with about 300 such schools across the country—and elite New England-style prep schools make up the tiniest slice of all.
We had a lively hour answering questions and talking about the many wonderful benefits of sending a child to one of our schools. Questions ranged from “How will I know if my child is ready for boarding school?” and “Should my child repeat 9thgrade?” to questions about homesickness, mental well-being, and fitting in to broader questions about how each of our schools distinguishes itself. We talked about financial aid initiatives, ways in which we meet the health and emotional needs of our students, how we reduce anxiety, and innovative new academic programs like our own Pearse Hub for Innovation.
Schools like Loomis attract extremely talented students who want to be surrounded by other motivated and talented students and who are already doing well but want to push themselves still further. One of the myths about boarding school is that it is only for troubled students. This is simply not the case—indeed, our students are mature and responsible young people. For me, one of the biggest advantages of schools like ours is that we are so diverse with students and faculty hailing from across the world. Few other schools have such a concentration of international and national talent, and it is this environment that allows our students to grow and thrive.
Another myth is that our schools are only for the wealthy. As a group of schools, we spend millions of dollars every year to ensure that our schools remain accessible to a broad range of students. At Loomis, one third of our students receive need-based financial aid, and our total budget for aid exceeds $11 million each year. It is the largest expense that we have outside of salaries and benefits. In our last capital campaign, we raised over $30 million for our financial aid endowment, which continues to be a school priority.
The TABS and the “Ready for More” websites have a ton of good information and statistics to help prospective parents and students answer a range of questions and to learn more about the benefits of boarding school. For example, boarding school students are more likely to say that their peers are motivated students than are students at other private day schools or public schools. They also do more homework, report that they learn self-discipline, have helpful counselors, and have higher levels of satisfaction with their faculty; 78 percent of students in boarding schools say that they were well prepared for college compared to only 36 percent of private day and 30 percent of public school students. Finally, over 50 percent of boarding school students go on to earn an advanced degree. You should explore the site yourself as it is chock full of fascinating data on the advantages of boarding school.
The one thing I thought that the panel was missing were parents. As our parents, you are well aware of the many advantages of a boarding school—even for our day students—and you are among the best messengers we have about the value of boarding school. Please feel free to share your experience with any prospective families you know.
Check out the very first issue of tête-à-tête with The Association of Boarding Schools. In this issue: Jamila Everett, Dave Tinagero, and Daniel Gentle.
Peter Upham, TABS Executive Director, and Donna Orem, NAIS President, co-authored this blog.
Independent schools exist to help young people learn, grow, and become healthy adults. Our schools have been highly successful, many for hundreds of years, but as a number of schools have experienced in recent years, the scourge of sexual misconduct can affect any institution that serves children.
Sexual misconduct — which can range from verbal harassment to forcible rape — undermines the bedrock expectation that schools will provide a safe place for children to learn. It violates the core values of independent schools and the ethical standards of the thousands of educators who devote their lives to teaching, coaching, and mentoring the students in their care. To protect the children our industry exists to serve and to deliver on the promise independent schools make to families, our schools must address this issue head on. As leaders of associations that serve nearly 2,000 schools and associations of schools, we are committed to doing so.
By Trish Fogarty
Editor’s Note: Trish Fogarty posted this story to her Facebook page the night before her daughter Margaret graduated from The Rectory School. Since then her son Patrick and daughter Kathleen have also joined Rectory’s family. Rectory shared this story with Trish’s permission; TABS is pleased to re-post with Trish’s permission as well.
I dropped her off at boarding school for her 8th-grade year, knowing she would be there for two years. She was 13 and we were both soaked with tears by the time we said our goodbyes.
In the weeks that followed, many friends and acquaintances asked me why I would send her away. So many women said, “I would never send my daughter away.”
I understood how puzzling it may have seemed to other people, and I spent many conversations talking about why and how, and I realized I was making excuses, as if I had to defend myself. I think I worried that people would think less of me, they would think it must have been easy for me to do, or they would think I was a bad Mom.
After too much time making excuses my response became this: “Don’t ever say you would NEVER do something, because the very thing you said you would never do, could be the EXACT thing that your child needs.”
We’re often asked why TABS doesn’t rank schools. The short answer? It’s all about fit. The long answer? Here goes…
As we all know, one can find web sites (frequently run by for-profit groups) that rank schools by the average SAT college admission test scores of their students or graduates, or by other individual measures. We feel that this practice borders on the unethical; the information provided is certainly misleading. We do not rank schools, period—by test scores, by any other single metric, or by any formula or synthesis of metrics.
Helen H. Waldron, M.Ed., an academic tutor at Noodle Pros recently published an article, “Why Your Child Should Attend Boarding School” for Forbes.com and wrote this piece exclusively for TABS.
“Why would anyone send their kids to boarding school?” Since 1989, when I signed on as a boarding school teacher I have been answering this question. As a teen who yearned to live outside the confines of my home town, I vicariously lived through my friends who attended boarding school. They wrote letters telling me about classmates from places like Bern, Switzerland and Sapporo, Japan. They rowed in regattas, played squash, took Mandarin class and joined debate club. They cheered on friends at water polo matches, studied abroad, went dog sledding, joined animation club, directed and produced an original play, and the list goes on. Not surprisingly, I chose a boarding school career.
News reports about sexual misconduct in schools are no longer uncommon. Whether the allegations are about current student – student sexual assault or past teacher – student sexual abuse, no type of school is immune, including independent schools. A claim of sexual misconduct invariably triggers a crisis for the school. The stakes for a school responding to this type of crisis are high. Missteps can result in significant harm to a school’s most valuable asset, its reputation. Damage to a school’s reputation can adversely impact relationships with students, parents, alumni, donors and prospective applicants.
There are, in my opinion, two key organizational elements that are crucial for helping schools weather the storm in such a crisis. First, the board and the administration must have a collaborative working relationship. Second, the school must have established principles to guide board and the administration during the crisis. I will address each of these key elements. Read more ›
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