The Foreign Service Journal, June 2016

82 JUNE 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT T he reasons Foreign Service parents choose the board- ing school route are as varied as the students themselves: unsuitable school- ing at post, special needs support, gifted student opportuni- ties and the need for stability have all been regularly cited. In my conversations with these parents, one thing that most have in com- mon is that boarding school was not part of their child’s long-term education plan. Something happened, and suddenly boarding school was an option they needed to evaluate quickly! Such was the case with us when we John F. Krotzer is a Foreign Ser- vice family member and, most recently, the community liaison officer at Consulate Mumbai. He and his family are heading to Beijing for their next posting. Applying to Boarding School: Lessons Learned Boarding schools are a very important option for FS children. Here are some tips on applying. BY JOHN F. KROTZER learned in 2014 that our next post was going to be Beijing. While the interna- tional schools there look great, the req- uisite language programmy wife would enter meant that our oldest daughter would end up attending three different schools during her last three years of high school—a very unappealing proposition to any teenager. We jointly decided that boarding school in the United States would be the best option for her, and I began to quickly learn as much as I could about the process. I spoke with the State Department’s Family Liaison Office and the Office of Allowances, and I networked with as many boarding school parents as I could find. (The Facebook page “AAFSWBoard- ing School Parents,” for which I am an administrator, was unfortunately not yet in existence, but is now a great network and resource.) I also did a lot of research online, particularly about the application process and about college placement by the schools that interested our daughter. Ultimately, she applied to five schools in New England, interviewed on campus at each of them, and waited patiently. We were very optimistic, as she was an honor student with great grades, very strong test scores and lots of extracurricular success. To our surprise, she was admitted to only one school and waitlisted at the other four. Despite all of our research, we discovered a number of key things about the boarding school application process too late. As a result, we experienced several “aha” moments—some good, and some not so good—over things we really wish we had known about earlier. While some of these discoveries are more relevant to students applying to so- called “elite” schools in the United States, several are applicable to all types of boarding schools worldwide. I hope a few of these lessons will be helpful to those in the Foreign Service thinking about boarding school in the future. “Need-Blind” vs. “Need-Aware” We have all heard howmost colleges are “need-blind” in admissions, mean-