California boarding schools? It's not an oxymoron
Long a fixture of the East Coast, such campuses are gaining interest in the Golden State.
As a young woman living in Southern California, Kelly Boss never thought much about boarding schools. They were a mystery or at most a cinematic fancy embodied by Brookfield of "Goodbye, Mr. Chips" or the Welton Academy of "Dead Poets Society."
That changed when her daughter Mackenzie learned about the Thacher School in Ojai and its horse and outdoor program. Although she would never have imagined her daughter there, the Bosses came to view it as the perfect fit.
But Kelly Boss understood the reactions of other parents who appeared aghast at the idea.
"Other mothers look at you like how can you possibly send your daughter away, and I've had parents say, you two don't look like you don't get along," said Boss, a Santa Barbara resident.
Although boarding schools have a long tradition in Europe and the Northeast, Californians are still apt to equate them with troubled youths or disinterested parents.
"I think the further west you go, the greater the misunderstanding and misconceptions about boarding schools," said Benjamin D. Williams IV, who was born at an East Coast boarding school where his parents were on staff and now heads the Cate School in Carpinteria.
Longtime Bay Area educational consultant Alice Jackson said Californians "looked down their noses" at boarding schools, which were viewed as enclaves of the white upper crust, turning out snobbish elites primed to elbow their way into the best Ivy League schools -- in other words, relics of staid East Coast tradition that many had sought to escape by moving west.
But that mind set is evolving, and the number of boarding students at California schools has risen nearly 8% over the last decade, according to the National Assn. of Independent Schools.
The Assn. of Boarding Schools tallied 3,195 students at 25 member schools in the West in 2007. That number is dwarfed by the 19,722 boarders at 96 schools in New England. West Coast schools still do not have the cachet of institutions such as New Hampshire's Phillips Exeter, founded in 1781, or Groton in Massachusetts, which dates to 1884.
Still, campuses like Cate, Thacher (founded in 1889), the Webb Schools in Claremont and Stevenson School on the Monterey Peninsula attract students from around the world and consistently rank among the nation's top prep schools in selectivity and test scores.
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