The Foreign Service Journal, June 2016

88 JUNE 2016 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT boarding schools. This reality leads many people to con- sider having their child repeat a grade to improve their chances for admission. In fact, when visiting boarding schools, you will find many students whose first year of boarding school was a repeat of their last year of public or parochial school. This can seem like an appealing option—after all, who doesn’t think their kid could use an extra year of maturing? But keep in mind that the Office of Allow- ances will not pay for an extra year of tuition unless your child is formally held back. The rules for this are very specific, and rather than repeat them here, anyone considering this option should reach out to the Office of Allowances directly for the latest guidance. There is another factor that can also come into play at some of the more elite boarding schools—athletics. Boarding schools that are competitive in sports may also be recruiting to fill open spots on their teams, and for sports like football, they may be targeting sophomores or juniors who are bigger and faster than their freshman counterparts. That further reduces the number of available openings to upperclassmen. Our daughter applied to all five schools as a rising junior. Two of the schools that waitlisted her told me directly that she would have been admit- ted had she applied as a sophomore. Fur- thermore, the school she was admitted to accepted 11 juniors: two bright young women, and nine young men recruited for football or ice hockey! College Counseling & Placement Many boarding schools, for better or for worse, pride themselves highly on their college placement results, which in most cases are focused primarily on U.S.-based Keep in mind that the Office of Allowances will not pay for an extra year of tuition unless your child is formally held back.